I am currently interviewing people to fill a freelance proofreading/copy editing spot at the magazine where I work. If someone has a misspelling on their cover letter or résumé, should they automatically be excluded from consideration for such a job? I mean, everyone makes mistakes, but I’d be hiring them to catch such errors. What do you all think?
How about asking the applicants to proofread their resumés? If applicants catch their own errors relatively quickly, that would demonstrate their ability to catch the errors. After all, you wouldn’t be paying them to write anything. 
If you were hiring demolition experts, would you exclude someone because they had burns and missing fingers when they came in for the interview?
I’m certainly not perfect, but if I were applying for an editor’s position, I would have to be 100% sure that my application was error-free before sending it in.
“Resumé” has only one accent mark. People who live in glass houses, better proofread first. 
Seriously, anyone going for an editor’s position is going to work pretty hard to keep mistakes out of his resumé, and will probably have more time to work on it than when he’s on the job. One error may not mean anything, but if there are several mistakes, it’s a sure sign of lack of attention to detail.
Eesh, Chuck… I’ll have you know that your reply sent me scurrying to my dictionaries (yes, I have more than one–so sad) in a panic. But, according to Webster’s New World and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, résumé is the preferred spelling. It looks stupid to me, too. 
The RESUME debate brings something to mind. I wouldn’t disqualify applicants for a supposed error without giving them a chance to explain themselves. What you assume to be an error may just be another correct (or at least defensible) way of doing things.
I like this idea. They can demonstrate their knowledge of their craft by adding the proof markings to their own resume. Proofing your own words is a difficult task, since you tend to see what is already in your mind’s eye. If they can find all their own errors, they get the job.
Your problem is you used English dictionaries. I looked it up in my French one – resumé is the form they use. “Résumé” certainly mispronounces the word (it would be pronounced Ray’-su-may, not res’-u-may), but it does appear to be more common.
But someone using “resumé” is not making an error, just using a variant.
Sorry Chuck, but as an editor and former résumé writer, I must disagree with you. It is irrelevant how it appears in your French dictionary. The word has become part of the English language now; there are two accepted ways to spell it IN ENGLISH (with both accents or with none), and anyone who doesn’t use one of the accepted forms is making a mistake IN ENGLISH. (of course, spelling it with none isn’t strictly correct either, but since English doesn’t bother with diacritical marks as a rule it’s acceptable - using one and not the other is NOT acceptable.)
As for the OP, I agree that having the applicants proofread their own résumés is a clever idea. It’s amazing how something can slip past you because you know what it’s supposed to say. Once, when I was still writing résumés, my partner wrote one for a manufacturing supervisor that was to include the phrase “responsible for all shift work.” I think you can imagine which letter got left out of that sentence.
John proofed his own work and missed it. I did a follow-up proof and I missed it. The client did the final proof and HE missed it. The first person who noticed it was someone who was interviewing him (ouch). He came in, furious; we apologized and reprinted his materials. He eventually saw the funny side of it and said, “You know, boys, it’s true as written; I just didn’t want to phrase it that way on my résumé.”
My own personal best résumé typo story: I had a client come in who was going after a job in customer service at a long-distance phone company. The work experience she gave me was all “waitress in a bar” type stuff. When I was writing her summary of qualifications, I was casting about for a way to characterize her job history to make it applicable to customer service, and decided, “All of these jobs require extensive contact with the public…” so I wrote “5+ years of public contact experience.” Only I left the “l” out of “public.”
The thing that makes the typo particularly funny is that the woman called me a day before she came in to review the materials and admitted that the job history she gave me was bogus: she was actually a stripper. So when she came in and looked her résumé over, she started laughing and said, “honey, you’ve never been in a titty bar, have you?” I blushed and allowed as how I hadn’t, and asked how she knew. She pointed to the typo and said, “It’s a state law…there’s no pubic contact allowed.”
Should I point out that in official standard english, there are no accents? Or should I assume that he knows this already. The official English spelling is with no accents, the official french spelling is with an accent acute on the last e, there is no acceptable spelling in any language which uses two accents acute to spell resume.
Going back to the OP.
If I ever noticed a boo-boo on my resume or cover letter when applying for ANY kind of publishing job, I wouldn’t even have the nerve to show up for the job interview; I’d just toss that one out as a Lesson Learned.
I am neurotic enough to re-read my resume and cover letters umpteen times, and even open the envelope to check them AGAIN. Unlike, I might add, my SDMB posts . . .
I think the British equivalent of the debate about how many accents in resume is the deabte about the plural of curriculum vitae. FWIW, my French dictionary (Le Larousse de Poche, 1998 edition) gives it with acute accents on both the Es.
If you’re 100 per cent confident that it’s a mistake (e.g. if it’s a clear and obvious spelling error or typo), you should reject them out of hand. It’s reasonable to assume that somebody will pay as much attention to their CV as they do to anything, and if they make mistakes on that, then it indicates a lack of ability. If it’s possible that it’s a stylistic variant, you should probably give them a chance to explain themselves.
My Larousse French-English gives résumé for the French.
Merriam-Webster gives résumé as the primary and resumé and resume as the variants.
However you want to spell it, the most egregious mangling of the word I have encountered was the placement specialist at Control Data Institute in Southfield, MI, who, in 1980, was sending kids out on interviews and telling them that the word was pronounced ree ZOO mee. (I’d have sacked him.)
I just wanted to share a resume story of my own (note the lack of accents due to my inability to figure out how to make them).
When I was about to be officially hired, after working here for 6 months anyway as a “casual” employee, my boss was obligated to consider other applicants. One of them misspelled the name of the university three or four times throughout her application-- and she’d been working here, in a different department, for years.
Her resume was promptly “filed” in the recycling bin.
I hate to jump on the bandwagon here, but RealityChuck, you need to get rid of that french dictionary.
Resume in french is spelled with two acute accents, one on each e.
On the obituary page of today’s Raleigh News and Observer, there is an “In remembrance of” notice, which has as its opening sentence: “Life is but a shopping place, a pause in what’s to be, a resting place along the road to sweet eternity.” Based on the rest of the text, which continues the analogy of a journey, I’ve got to believe that this was supposed to read “life is but a stopping place”.
I’m going to check if they run a corrected version tomorrow.
My CV (I’m not getting involved in that other debate) includes “A.M. in Public Policy Studies” and I have to be oh so careful to pay attention to that first “l” every time.
I would agree that unless it’s a possible variant, a misspelling should be grounds for immediate circular filing. Especially its/it’s, who’s/whose and there/their/they’re. (arg)
I’d overlook one typo, but not more, if the person is really good. It is hard to check your own work. But then I’d let them in on a trick: to check for typos read the document backwards. Then your brain won’t skip over words you know.
But then, I can’t even get a job as a proofreader right now, so who am I to talk?
Anecdote follows, feel free to ignore.
I edited essays for my friends while I was in university, and came across an interesting mistake that can only happen with computers. I noticed that my friend had spelled her last name incorrectly. I assumed it was a typo, and showed it to her. She replied, “But my spell-checker didn’t catch it.”
Investigation proved that she had entered it into her dictionary incorrectly, and had just hit ‘change’ every time it came up.
Will this person physically be in the office working or (since it is a freelance job) will he/she be working from home via computer/e-mail/fax?
Yeah, what she said. I’d be interested in hearing more about the job if it’s a telecommuting, on-your-own-time kind of thing. And I guarantee that my résumé doesn’t have any typos on it.