Univ. Graduates writing bad English in job letters, CVs - HR Expert

The CEO of Axis Human Capital Ltd, Dr Esi Ansah, has said some University graduates write horrible English in their job application letters and CVs.

"The CVs that we get, the cover letters that we get, the results from the tests we run… indicate that we have serious problems, serious challenges,” Dr Ansah, who doubles as an Assistant Professor at Ashesi University, told the Morning Starr host Kafui Dey Monday.

Dr Ansah said: “…We have university graduates we test as part of the recruitment process, and sometimes the English, the grammar, the tenses, subject-verb agreement” and “very basic” writing principles are wrongly done.

Apart from bad grammar, which she says affects applicants’ job gaining prospects, Dr Ansah also stated some of the graduates use text messaging language in their application letters.

“You read university students’ work or applicants’ work and it’s text language… I mean they are sending you letters and ‘be’ is now ‘b’ ”, she revealed.

The Lecturer of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Development also noted that graduates have become too accustomed to the use of clichés in their job applications – a situation she believes affects their chances of getting recruited.

“…We’ve over-coached people and over-scripted them, and when I say we, I’m talking about the community that does a lot of career, youth engagement and all these programmes, where people are writing absolute nonsense that makes no sense.

“So you get people writing things like: ‘I hereby submit my CV for your kind consideration in your highly reputable organisation; everybody is writing the same thing and it tells you the person is not being real, so even when the language is correct, it’s because it’s scripted, because they’ve ‘chewed’ it from somewhere, so they are not being real, and some of these, for me, I trace it to, one, the quality of Teachers and I think we focus too quickly on brick and mortar. We focus too quickly on: ‘let’s increase the number of schools, let’s generate more people going through the system without pausing to think of the people who are teaching,” Dr Ansah explained.

“For me, I chose to be a Teacher and unfortunately there are a lot of people in teaching who are there as the last resort, something else didn’t work out, and so the answer starts from getting people interested in the profession of teaching…”