French is not my first language, but I contrived to get my CV proofread before I sent it out.
Most of the time it’s not cool, but you’re hiring Chinese code monkeys. Who gives a shit whether they have impeccable grammar or not?
If I see a resume with no errors and 6 months experience, vs someone with 10 and major relevant achievements, Im not going to reject the first simply because of spelling errors.
Its simply one piece of information to consider. If I had 100 resumes and tons of other good options, sure.
Otara
If it’s an editing or proofreading job, then no. Bad grammar is not okay.
Any other position (with the possible exception of “English Teacher”), meh. A few typos/awkward grammar shouldn’t make a huge difference unless the intent of the communication is garbled by the errors. If the message is clear, and other people understand what is being said/written, then no big whoop.
Its never O.K., start excusing a poor c.v. then you’ll find your self excusing poor work, its a job not a hobby.
No, I wouldn’t hire that person. Yes, communicating with clients is a significant aspect of that, but I think many people underestimate the value of interoffice communications, too.
If I hire someone who can’t use basic grammar, how can I trust that they will be able to convey to their co-workers what they’ve done, what they plan to do, accurately create and execute a business plan or even fully understand directions provided to them?
And what if they had to send something to my boss or higher? I wouldn’t want them to say something like, “I having finished the coding,” to the CEO. I’m hardly indispensable, but I do sometimes communicate with him or direct others to do so in order to give them visibility and to make sure they get credit for their work or so they can better explain what they’ve done. So hiring someone without basic written language skills reflects poorly on them, their work and on me.
Not exactly coding, but the phrase “All your base are belong to us” comes to mind.
Wait, that was Japanese.
In my profession, spelling counts. If you can’t spell well yourself, or use proper grammar, then you can’t always recognize spelling and grammar flaws in a customer’s order. If you prepare the order with an error in in, it will cost us money. So if you hand in a resume or application with errors on it, it will go straight into the “not considered” file.
Especially if you misspell the name of the road you live on, or the last company you worked for.
Skip them and go on to the next one, as said earlier. There are plenty of fantastic but unemployed software engineers who ARE able to communicate.
I agree or disagree depending on my mood that day. On one hand, yeah, Chinese code monkeys. Whatever. On the other, should I disregard the grammar on any resume that has precisely fuckall to do with writing? Should I care about the grammatical error of a 17 year old applying to work at my sandwich shop? His job is to cut tomatoes, not be a copy editor. So if I’m in an anal mood, I care because it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to proofread or have someone else proofread the sheet of paper I am judging you by. On the other days, just slice my tomatoes, or code, or whatever it is you do, and we’ll all be happy.
Dismissing them out of hand would be prejudice. Just assume it means you’ll have to do more work with them, and evaluate accordingly.
How the heck is that prejudicial?
Anyhow, for me and for the position stated, I would not out of hand dismiss them for that type of error, if everything else is up to snuff. However, I’m not in that business, so it may be a bigger deal than it seems to me.
It would be a mark against them, but if they have enough other qualities going for them it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. It’s always possible they’re the best candidate otherwise.
The person we hire will probably have to communicate with clients so we cannot have bad English going out in emails, it would make us look bad.
Not even reading any posts. Never.
I’m going to go with this idea too. Having someone else check your resume for spelling and grammar is just basic common sense, even if the language is your native tongue. I don’t know how many resumes I’ve proofread for other people, just as a favor…and I usually DO catch one or two mistakes in each one. And English wasn’t my best subject in school. It’s even better to get a professional check it, of course, but just having another couple of sets of eyeballs on the resume can help polish it.
We’ve got a thread (I believe it’s in MPSIMS) about how a tenant and landlord thought that they’d come to an agreement, but actually didn’t. Even if a job doesn’t deal primarily with communication, at some point the boss is going to tell the worker what to do, and the worker needs to understand what s/he’s supposed to be doing. I wouldn’t want to hire someone and always have to wonder if s/he understood what I said.
Right now, a couple of my doctors speak English with a heavy accent. If I can understand them, and they can understand me, that’s fine. But I’ve quit going to some doctors because I couldn’t understand their accents and/or their understanding of American English was severely lacking.
Since most of the people I hired had to prepare or proofread correspondence and contract documents, the resume was a pretty important document for me. If they couldn’t be bothered to proofread their own resumes, there was little hope that they would do the job properly.
No, it is not discrimination. Proficiency in English is a requirement for many jobs. In some cases, a test is required as part of the application process. It is not prejudice to toss out a resume that demonstrates a candidate’s language abilities don’t meet job requirements. In Canada at least, “bad grammar” is not protected by law, even if you learned English as a second language. If English is not your first language, you maybe required to complete and ESL test to demonstrate proficiency while job searching (similarly government positions require you to be able to communicate in both official languages and you will be tested.)
The LPGA tour put in a rule that golfers must know basic English. (if you don’t know that tour is dominated by Asian golfers in terms of top players) There was a big uproar about how that was discrimination and they quickly dropped the rule. I never understood the problem with that rule.
Normally, I would answer the OP with an unequivocal “No!” But then I looked at the example:
“Having experience with SQL databases.”
This is not bad grammar. It is short for “I am having experience with SQL databases,” which is perfectly correct but very non-standard usage for Americans. Reading it, I would assume the writer was from the sub-continent.
I was a software engineer for several decades. I would have no hesitation in talking to a person who had that on his/her resume. Many Indians I worked with wrote far better English than their American-born peers. On the other hand, a spelling error, or a true grammatical error would put me off immediately. Truly broken English would put me off (rather unfairly, as some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with had pretty lousy English). But there’s no failure to communicate here, just a non-American-standard choice of phrase - not evidence of carelessness on the part of the candidate. I would wait until speaking with the candidate before eliminating him/her on the grounds of inadequate English.
On the other hand, one ‘there’ when the candidate meant ‘their’ would rule him/her right out, because that would be carelessness.