

How not to apply for a job - johns
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1088-how-not-to-apply-for-a-job

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xiaoma
They complain, "We’ve received applications from people spelling 37signals as
'37 Signals'"

I find this pedantic in the extreme. It’s not the applicant’s fault that the
company struggles with standard English. They can choose their employees as
they like, but this doesn't seem to be in their own best interest. Harshly
judging and then publicly chastising applicants who might be trying to make
their cover letter grammatically correct might provide a temporary ego boost,
but it does little to help the business.

~~~
staunch
I had to re-read it just to make sure I understood that they're really so anal
as to care if people say 37signals vs 37 Signals. Pretty damn pretentious.

~~~
simonw
They care about attention to detail. They obviously want their job applicants
to care too.

I always make a point of checking the preferred spelling of a company or
product name when I write about them - probably because I worked at Yahoo! for
a year and you really get the importance of that ! hammered in to you (I also
have an easily mis-spelled surname).

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graywh
From the comments:

    
    
        Your book is actually copyright “37 Signals, LLC ”. Seems
        a bit harsh to dock people on how to type the name if you
        guys aren’t 100% consistent with it yourselves.

~~~
gojomo
"37 Signals, LLC" may be the legal name, while the preferred branding is
something different. (Their preference is pretty clearly "37signals" on their
homepage, much like the lowercasing in "eBay" and even "craigslist".)

A _designer_ should be very sensitive to such presentational choices.

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jsdalton
This mentality is frequently at odds with how companies find the best
candidates.

It presumes that you, the company, have this great and wonderful thing to
offer some lucky individual, the candidate. The candidate, gracious for even
the opportunity to apply for such a choice offer, spends hours proofreading
and otherwise perfect his or her resume and cover letter.

What this ignores is reality. Often the people you want to hire couldn't care
less about sending you a resume to prove to you why you are worth their time.
They have got better things to do -- and probably a good job that already pays
them quite well, thank you very much.

I'm nitpicking a bit here -- obviously it pays to be professional in your
communications, no matter what the circumstances. But it's an exceedingly
dangerous mentality, particularly for companies operating in our space, where
good talent is quite scarce. 37 Signals (oops! I mean "37Signals") can get
away with it probably, because they are so well known. Doubtful whether your
startup can...

Judge candidates by what they will be doing for you, not by arbitrary weed out
criteria like getting your company's product names right.

~~~
mxh
_(oops! I mean "37Signals")_

I'm pretty sure you mean "37signals".

------
DenisM
I'll summarize the article for you (312 words):

when applying for a job, check spelling for the company and its products
names. We don't want to be grumpy, but... we are! Kthxbye.

~~~
deepster
I'll summarize it further: Let's pick on obscure errors to get this blog
posted on as many websites as possible to generate traffic.

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axod
From their product blog in May 2008:

"Each of the 37 Signals products comes with a free trial and depending on the
size of your organization and project needs, some of the solutions are free.
You just have to give them a try."

[http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/05/4-great-
tools-t....](http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/05/4-great-tools-t.html)

~~~
puns
That's a direct quote from a customer, not their own copy. I think the problem
isn't that they want their job applicants to be crazy about details but the
fact their company name isn't very easy to spell. They chose unconventional
spelling presumably because it looked nice, but people who recall the name are
only going to remember the name, not the spelling.

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jrockway
It sounds like they have their attitude wrong. When I apply for a job, it's
"why would I want to work for you", not "why should we hire you". They are
acting like 37signals is the only place a person would ever want to work, and
that they are doing you a favor for hiring you.

Getting hired is not a favor. It's a mutually beneficial business
relationship.

~~~
gizmo
It is a favor in the sense that the company is taking the bigger risk. If you
turn out to be a bad employee, it is costly to get rid of you, and the costs
of finding a replacement are significant. Add to that the lost opportunity
cost of being short-staffed and the costs add up.

I'm guessing that 37signals has 10 or so employees. At that stage they can't
afford any bad hires.

Considering it's their money and their company that's at stake, I can't blame
them for being careful. They're not acting like they're the only place any
person would ever want to work, they're acting like they can't make any
mistakes. So they have to be extremely careful, and reject everybody who isn't
perfect.

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fendale
Back in the day, by father worked in recruitment for a rather large place that
got many many more applicants per jobs (like most places I guess, but this one
would employ several 100 new people per year with thousands of applications
per recruitment round).

He told me they used spelling mistakes to filter applicants - more than X
(cannot remember what X was) typos in the form and you were cut - harsh, but
somewhat fair at the same time. Yes they probably lost some good people, but
probably many more bad ones - all recruitment is like that, there is always
someone who should have gotten in that doesn't unfortunately.

He was not recruiting IT or even degree level folk either ...

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mosburger
Am I the only one who is kinda bugged that everyone is getting hung up on the
"37signals vs. 37 Signals" debate, both in HN's comments, and SvN's comments?

Look - that wasn't the point of the article! IMHO, the point of the article
was to do some research, try your best, and not come across as shoddy. As a
former hiring manager, I can attest to the sometimes shocking lack of
attention to detail people have when applying for a job. You are sometimes
competing against literally hundreds of other applicants, and people reviewing
the resumes don't have a lot to go on. Just make sure you try your hardest and
do your best if you want to be considered for the position.

And I didn't come away with the feeling that 37s would exclude someone ONLY
BECAUSE they put a space between 37 and signals. But they do count it as a
negative mark when reviewing a pile of 80 applications.

If there are 10 interview slots, and you and one other applicant have
identical resumes and are competing for that 10th slot, and it's down to you
and that other applicant, the spelling of the company name just _might_
matter.

Of course, everyone here is an entrepreneur and not really applying to
corporate jobs anyway, right? ;)

~~~
dreish
This seems to be about the only reasonable comment on this page, and yet the
ones that are getting upvoted are the ones that are making excuses for
mediocrity and criticizing 37signals for using attention to detail as a hiring
criterion. (I can't upvote yours -- I lost my vote months ago when I downvoted
all 20 or 30 copies of a multiply-posted comment, which the system interpreted
as karma-bombing.)

I hadn't believed news.yc was really headed downhill until I saw the comments
here. If "details don't matter" is really the winning view, lolcats and "we'll
do it live" post chains are probably not too far behind.

(Edit: I just noticed the reason the parent comment is being ignored is more
than likely just a timing issue.)

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ardit33
slightly pompous. Most hackers probably don't use word or have spell check
handy. (I use VI or Textpad). When I send a resume, it is usually a simple.txt
file, and I noticed I had a misspelling.

I went and did a spellcheck online, and noticed two errors, or recent edits. I
fixed them, but I already sent it somewhere. If the company doesn't want to
consider me b/c of these two minor errors, then it is their loss.

~~~
gizmo
When you're considering somebody for a position you want to make sure they fit
in well. And if everybody at the company has an eye for detail, and habitually
spellchecks all internal and external communication then you wouldn't fit in.
After all, if people don't spellcheck their resumé they're definitely not
going to spellcheck casual emails.

Also you have to give the impression that you really want the job. Hiring
costs a lot of money, so if they think you might jump ship after 6 months,
you're no hire. Sloppy writing and no personalized letter indicate that you
don't care for the job or don't really need it.

Add the risk of the false positive (money and hassle) to the equitation and
you become a clear no-hire.

~~~
ardit33
I still don't get it how spelling error = bad hire. I probably might have
small gramatical lapses, but that doesn't make me a bad engineer.

Keep in mind that not everybody knows English natively. I was born in a
different country, and know three other languages, and it is common to say a
word, and the real meaning is something different from what I think it is.

I always spell behaviour, with the U, and word always get is a misspelling,
which obviously is not.

As I said, I hope a that a future employer is able to look past
superficialities, and get to the core if I am a good engineer, and fit for
their culture.

At my previous Coorporate Job (big finance company), everybody had to dress
well (collared Shirts all the time), and your resume had to look good, be
formated right, yet the engineers that worked there were two notches down,
both in quality and quantity of the work, from the current company where I
work now, where everybody dresses casually, people have less formalities and
have the "Less b.s. and let's get things done" attitude.

Obviously people that care about "looks", and appearances, would not be
comfortable at this place.

Plus, at work I have both word, and Automatic spellcheck on emails. Yet
gramatical errors are almost inevitable for a foreign born, still this doesn't
make me a lesser engineer, or a lesser hacker.

~~~
gizmo
A spelling error can be a superficiality, but it can also be a symptom of an
underlying problem: sloppy thinking.

And sloppy thinkers generally make for for poor programmers, because they keep
making the same trivial mistakes, keep breaking the build, and so forth.

There are, of course, many people who are careful programmers but sloppy
writers. The question is, should the company take that risk? A large company
probably can afford to take that risk, smaller companies probably can't.

And if programmers make spelling mistakes in function/variable names, then
yes, I'm afraid that makes them lesser engineers.

------
jasonfried
"It presumes that you, the company, have this great and wonderful thing to
offer some lucky individual, the candidate."

No it doesn't.

We're just asking you to spell or name, our product names, and everything else
right. That's not a tall order, it's basic writing etiquette. This is your job
application. It's your first impression. Spelling is important.

If you can't get that right, or don't notice that it's wrong, then I don't
think you are paying attention to the kind of details that we think are
important. Spelling, writing, paying attention to spaces, characters, letters
-- those things are important to us.

It's not pretentious of an employer to expect someone to check their spelling
-- especially the spelling of the company name. That's a basic writing skill.
If you are applying for a job you better believe it matters to the employer.
Ignore that advice at your own risk.

~~~
timcederman
Then how do you explain your (as in 37signal's) own lapses?

~~~
timcederman
Never mind - I just noticed your reply on 37signals.com to someone else, which
I felt was a bit of a cop-out given the emphasis you placed on the company
name. If it was that important, I would have thought you would get it right on
things like your incorporated company name or public blog.

JF 16 Jun 08

Ben, we’re all about making mistakes. We make them all the time. But making a
spelling mistake on a job application is the one place you shouldn’t be making
a spelling mistake. And I can promise you this opinion isn’t unique to
37signals, we’ve just chosen to talk about it publicly.

We will likely be sharing part of the designer hiring process once we’ve
successfully hired someone. It wouldn’t make sense to share a resume with
someone we’re considering if we haven’t hired them yet. Someone could lose
their current job that way. Or we might be setting unfair expectations for
someone.

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axod
Yeah to be honest I sort of feel sorry for whoever gets the job.

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cia_plant
If the job were public relations or something, this would be understandable to
me. But I've known many people who were extremely competent in a field, but
didn't really care about things that didn't interest them (such as job
applications). You should look at these people's portfolios, not dismiss them
over some assumption about how their trivial spelling errors speak to their
inner character.

If these job applicants have a responsibility to be professional in their
presentation of their skills, why don't you have a responsibility to be
professional in your appraisal of their applications? These are completely
petty reasons to drop a resume, akin to "they showed up at the interview
without a tie."

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babul
Attention to detail is important.

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helveticaman
37 signals are getting a little bit arrogant...just, just a little bit.

