Help, Don't Hurt

A basic rule of the job search is to take advantage of every touch point you have with a hiring company. Example: I receive a daily barrage of emails, setting up interviews, asking questions, etc., and it's alarming how many truly smart candidates pen notes that would embarrass a seventh-grader. Run-on sentences, malaprops, no caps or basic punctuation, etc.

I'm not some old fuddy-duddy; I understand that email is a more casual medium. With friends, emails can be as informal as you want. With potential employers, button it up. The bottom line is that companies make hiring decisions based on imperfect, incomplete information. If a piece of your information is an illiterate email, that cannot possibly help your cause.

Here's a more forceful take on this.