Typos in a resume can kill your chances for a job interview faster than almost anything else you can imagine. That fact was brought home in a recent piece I read on resumetarget.com.

If you don’t know how to type, take lessons, a course, online or off, to get up to speed. If you haven’t used spell check for some reason, start. Nothing, no e-mail, resume or cover letter, should go out without spell checking.

How many resumes do you have? Spell check and proofread them all.

But don’t rely just on spell checking, it can miss usage of the wrong word in a sentence and if can even miss misspellings from time to time, I’ve found. Read everything you write like a proofreader.

I’ve found this increasingly important as I’ve gotten older because my typing seems to have become more prone to errors. I routinely type form when I want from, for example. Not sure why, but I try to stay alert for it.

Know your typing foibles too and watch for them. It may mean the difference between getting called in for an interview and being tossed on the resume discard pile.

John N. Frank