Here's a real world example for the 12-25 yrd old folks here:
In my last job I had to interview people to fill in a couple of entry-level positions. No experience was necessary, only minimal computer skills needed (aka you know how to open a program in windows and you had to be familiar with Outlook and MS Word) and a high school diploma.
I received 30 something applications for the positions. All applicants were between 18 and 25.
I'm not the type to interview people to ask them questions that I can be lied to about.. i'm a practical person. My interviews gave the applicant a hypothetical scenario and asked them to get on the computer/phone and show me or guide me through the steps he/she would take to try and deal with the issue.
As I worked for a travel agency, the scenario I used for that batch was a simple problem of a client being overseas and the hotel he had booked through our company could not find his reservation and the hotel claimed that our company had never made a reservation for this client. After giving the scenario to the applicant I told them that our system received e-mail confirmations from the hotel itself on a daily basis and that he could find a copy of that email on the outlook program and that usually what we did was send a copy of that email to the hotel manager to get this resolved.
note: spell check was disabled on the system.
And that is when I could really see the applicant's true skills at work.
Out of the 30 something applicants, 4 couldn't use Outlook (but claimed they could in their resume), about 12 of them simply attached a copy of the hotel's confirmation email, typed in the subject 'here's the confirmation email' and clicked 'send' (out of those 12 only a few bothered to put anything in the body of the email).
Those 16 people I immediately dropped from my list.
The remaining 14 people put in a decent subject 'title' on the email, attached the file and wrote a short letter to the hotel manager. Which is exactly what I was looking for.
However, we only had 3 positions open. Out of those 14 I gave the jobs to the 3 that had the best spelling and grammar (some of those had horrible spelling and some sentences made no sense).
Instant messaging / text messaging spelling and grammar does not work in a business environment. You may think that you can 'switch' to professional way of writing when you need it but it is not true. Once instant messaging -type spelling becomes a habit it will become the way you write and express yourself.
I cannot tell you how many emails from travel agencies and clients around the world I would receive on a daily basis that had 'lol' and
signs all over the place .. and this was on legally binding BUSINESS agreements over email.
