Theirs a problem with you're emailGrammar and spelling mistakes, such as those in the subject line of this e-mail, are sure to get you the wrong kind of attention in your job hunt. Modern software has made writing e-mails so quick and easy that you can easily find yourself clicking "send" before you really should have.
Spell-checker is your enemy
That darn, deceptive spell-check feature is your enemy. Sure, it fixes the obvious misspellings, but it misses the context, so you can end up using the wrong their / there / they're or its / it's by accident.
(My weakness, because of the way I type with a very dominant right hand, is writing "form" instead of "from" and the dang spell-checker never catches it... because it's spelled right even if it's the wrong word!)
You need to re-read your emails carefully -- my best advice is to set them aside after you've drafted them, take a bio break or a walk around the block, and come back and proof-read once more before hitting "send."
The need for clearing your head to make sure your email is simple and makes sense leads to my next suggestion, which is:
Simpler is safer
A lot of the bad emails I see aren't bad because the person writing them is unintelligent. Quite the opposite. They are bad because an intelligent person is trying to say too much, in too complicated a way, with too much complexity, in a bid to sound qualified for the job.
But that is just exactly the wrong approach.
Because, in fact, what employers and hiring managers are looking for is somebody who can communicate clearly and effectively. Rarely do long, complicated words and compound, complex sentences make you sound easy-to-understand.
And those longer, more turgid e-mails have a much higher chance of a misspelling, or grammar mistake, or unclear meaning, than a simple email.
Look, we're trying to get you a job here, not win the Nobel Prize, so don't over-
complicate it and get too fancy.
It reminds me of a famous exchange between two writers who did win the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner (famous for complex, dense prose) and Ernest Hemingway (who rarely used words greater than two syllables):
Faulkner: "Hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner! Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" If you're trying to get a job, simple, clear communication is far more effective than big five-dollar words.
As an example, which of these two people would you rather hire?
Sally Simple writes, "I work well with teams, that might not necessarily like each other, to get them to understand the other side's viewpoint, sometimes with a bit of humor, and work together so that we can all be successful as a company."
While Terry Turgid elucidates, "My background indicates a capability to bring together disparate elements of the organizational structure in which inherent tensions arise due to the substance of the work output, the cross-utilization of organizational resources, and competition for allocations and prioritzations that occur as a result, and to enable those elements to optimize their effort co-ordination and process implementation in order to achieve synergistic outcomes on behalf of the global organization."
Now both of those say the same thing (I think), but which candidate would you put in charge of getting sales and marketing to work together? Or leading the product and tech groups on an important new initiative?
I'll take Sally Simple every time.
My rule of thumb for job hunt emails is: if Mom can't understand it, you're not communicating. Not so incidentally, this rule applies to 80% of business email communication, not just the job hunt.
OK, folks, that's my two bits on e-mails. I hope you have a clearly successful and simply wonderful week! How do you prevent yourself from making the type of mistakes I just made in the subject line? My advice is to not trust the computer and to keep it simple.
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