KEY POINTS:
Job seekers' application letters are increasingly arriving on employers' desks littered with "text speak" - and getting shoved to the bottom of the pile as a result.
One recruitment consultant told the Herald she had seen an entire CV written in the style of writing made popular by mobile phone messaging.
It is a kind of shorthand, with vowels and punctuation missing.
Recruitment Consulting Services Association president Jacqui Barratt has lost count of the number of applicants who "dont no wot 2 rite".
"It's ridiculous. Sometimes I couldn't even tell you what they were saying," said the Salt Recruitment director. "I've said to them, 'You've got to remember that the generation you might be writing to may not have any idea about what you've just said'."
Ms Barratt said recruitment consultants often ran tests to validate candidates' ability to write properly. "Some of them write their whole CV in text language, not just the cover letter."
It would particularly be a problem for job seekers wanting management or personal assistant roles.
Executive Taskforce general manager John Buchanan said that for job applications, poor proofreading was worst with new graduates. "Sometimes there's numerals being used instead of words. Punctuation seems to be something that's slipped off some people's radar."
He said "rambling" sentences with no punctuation were a turn-off and didn't provide the hard-hitting impact a job application needed. "They're not getting across what they can do and what they've achieved."
Text-language CVS
Not acceptable for:
* Management positions.
* Personal assistants.
* Journalists.
Could go down better for:
* Phone-based customer service jobs.
* Web designers.
