A warning to HR and Recrooters

Image credit: typolover.com

Some nit-picks from recruitment adverts and job descriptions I have perused in the past week:

• "The Blah-Blah Centre is a state of the art purpose built, one stop shop delivering to all the communities’ health needs"

What a truly horrible sentence! I can [just about] forgive the lack of a comma after "state of the art" and the lack of hyphenation where there really should be hyphenation, but the apostrophe? I suspect that what they meant was "delivering to the entire community's health needs" - what they actually wrote was something quite different.

• "As a member of our fast-moving and highly professional team, your principle strengths will include ..."

Deep sigh.

• "Personal characteristics of the successful candidate will include: Outgoing. Highly motivated. Structured & organised. Decisive. Flexible. Discrete."

Discrete? A separate being? A candidate consisting of unconnected, distinct parts? Seems a bit odd to specify that quite so forcefully. Or maybe, just possibly, go with me on this ... they meant "discreet"? It's either that or we have a clear case of an employer who actively discriminates against conjoined twins ...

Many of the employers I work with still use typoes and similar carelessness as a means of screening candidates out of a hotly-contested selection process - although with dwindling literacy rates this has become more difficult. What hope have we when employers start lowering the bar in this way?