How not to get a job

I got an email from an alum the other day, who passed the following along. A job application had come in from a recent UPS graduate, and come in with problems:

The application was automatically put in the 'maybe/back-ups' folder because it was simply not clear - we couldn't find the person's overall GPA, nowhere did it just explicitly state whether the person had earned a BA and finished school, and the cv listed research, but not clearly what the context of that research was: A class paper? A conference? Paid research? The application did not get further consideration.

So, a few thoughts that may be worth passing along -

• The shorter, the better. Don't necessarily list everything, just highlight a few/the best.
• Be clear and use the visual layout to your advantage (in terms of placing GPA, BA, year, etc)
• Have people peer-edit it... but be careful, because another applicant actually sent in her cover letter with track changes. oops.

Words of wisdom. I got an email myself yesterday from a student (not from this campus) that was riddled with misspelled words and random capitalization. It doesn't give one much confidence about that student's diligence.