One of my clients just sent me a resume he’d paid for.  It was full of &s and had words capitalized that shouldn’t be.  This is from someone who has an impressive web page and appears to be quite the resume expert – and as far as I knew earlier, was.  My client made some adjustments and his version was much better. 

And under the heading of “Would you do business with this staffing agency?” comes the below email, forwarded five minutes later by my sister, a principal at an architectural firm that does high-profile projects such as stadiums and university buildings:

Just checking in before the weekend to say hello and to see how (name of company) may be able to help you with your short or long term staffing needs.  Would love to come in for a quick chat, see how you are and bring you through some excellent salary information for 2012.

Have a wonfderful wekend and please think of me first when a stafiing needs arises.

From the Branch Manager, no less and no, my sister has not done business with them before.  I only replaced the company name with the phrase in parenthesis. This person obviously doesn’t double check her emails – how attentive to detail can she be when sending a temp to a client?

I’ve written so many columns on grammar you’d think I was an English teacher.  I’m not perfect – I proof (sometimes), but from time to time I miss something.  So do professional editors, by the way. Only on my columns to my newspaper editors to I proof 3 or 4 times.  

But when a problem shows up repeatedly and/or in multiple forms, that’s not from overlooking something, it’s from (pick any of the following) carelessness, stupidity, arrogance, lack of intelligence, laziness, blatant disregard, not caring.

You are judged by your presentation.  In absence of information to the contrary, the information is interpreted negatively.   And no one, no one is going to give you the benefit of the doubt when your resume, or a similar form of business communication, is a mess.

You don’t believe me?  How many professional brochures do you see with &s distributed liberally throughout the copy, over capitalization, typos, grammar mistakes, etc?  Very, very, very, very few. 

And if you happen to find one, what’s your reaction?  “Look!  How funny!  They missed something!”  Now what if you picked up a brochure for a car, or refrigerator, or an HD TV and the brochure had multiple mistakes on every page?  Would you buy?  Or walk away?

I rest my case.