If you've seen my profile you'll know 2 key things about me - I'm a wordaholic AND I'm a Recruitment Consultant for a company similar to your Sheffield Consulting I believe. So, for the past 7 years in this job I have been tormented daily by this matter.
I place around 50-60 people per year, representing around 2,500 applicants per year. Add to this a substantial number of unsolicited enquiries & CV's and we're talking 3,000 CV's per year over my desk.
Amongst other things, we test each shortlisted candidate's "Verbal Reasoning" skills and report them as a percentile against an appropriate statistical population (in our case between 500 and 5000 previous "test-ees" - bit of recruitment humour there!!) As we are inevitably dealing with tertiary qualified people, it is (I suppose) pleasing to report that the great majority fall in the upper 50th percentile - because we're comparing them to each other and not ranking them by the correctness.
The crunch comes when doing referee checks - I doubt if there's been more than 1 or 2 final candidates over the past 7 years whose referees praised their report writing skills. Most referees tend to be 40-60 years old and thus, like me, place weight upon spelling and writing skills. However they almost all inevitably sigh and say (after giving me the bad news), "Well, that's the way it seems to be these days".
Unfortunately Cap K, IT seems to be the worst hit area. I've no doubt that this is due to the overwhelming percentage of IT specialists that have English as a 2nd language. Inevitably it is not rated as a serious problem by the employer though - they are more interested in the candidate's technical skills and their "Abstract Reasoning" (ie problem solving) score. Pleasingly, most lie in the top 10th percentile - they are bright cookies.
Simply speaking, I believe the weight you and I place upon literacy is a dying thing an dthat nothing can or will be done about it. Pessimist no, realist yes.
And now, more recruitment humour....
Irrespective of their programming ability, I for one get all heated up when the page designer puts poor English onto company web pages. When I was looking to sign up with an ISP, I researched the pages of the local companies to compare rates etc. One Perth-based company was signing its own praises loudly and promoting itself as "your partner is small business" etc for ISP, web page design and so on. Well, the splash page alone had 13 howlers!! I couldn't help myself so, with tongue firmly in cheek, emailed the Managing Director (who'd thoughtfully provided his direct email address for the purpose). I pointed out the errors one by one (no small task!!) and then suggested that, seeing I was in recruitment, maybe we could talk about recruiting a proof reader for the web design aspects of his compay's service.
Never heard from him - BUT the site was fixed within the week!!
stales
