Ask HN: is it unfair to refuse a job application simply based on bad writing?

If nothing else, it's worth it to the employer and the employee to invest in a course audit at a local university to help improve those skills. You might be surprised to see if that helps improve retention and reduce the attrition of human capital. Especially if you include those types of programs to your organization to improve key skills.

That said, I think grammatical errors from an ESL speaker aren't the be-all end-all of good communication. It would really depend on what else I had to go on. Was there a cover letter? "Responsibilities" section of his/her resume?

Often extremely clear thinkers more than compensate for non-native language skills with incisive, compelling expression.

tl:dr Bad writing (communication) is just cause for putting a resume to the side. But one-off grammatical errors wouldn't be the only think I'd go on.

My resume gets tailored as often as once per application, and the occasional mistake does end up on there. I fix them when I find them, but I expect their presence should not impact the essence of the resume for a manager with a clear understanding of the requirements they're hiring for.

That said, "I have advance knowledge..." isn't necessarily incorrect, if they are talking about their prophetic talents and not their level of expertise. :)

You did the right thing.

If they have no native-lang CV which you could understand, you will almost certainly have troubles communicating with them, which means no hire. If they didn't go through the trouble of getting a native English speaker to edit their CV, then how badly do they really want the job anyways?

Since you're trying to hire developers, you are undoubtedly aware that roughly 100% of the people who apply for your job are completely unqualified to program computers. Anything you can do to narrow that stack of 300 incompetents down to the 4 you can actually interview is worth doing.

So yes, ditch anybody who can't be bothered to proofread their resume. As other people have said, communication is an important skill for a developer. You have in your hands proof that they're not particularly good at it. Toss it and move on.

  When all candidates alike have to write Greek or Latin
  verse, it is relatively easy to decide which verse is the 
  best. Men thus selected on their classical performance were 
  then sent forth to govern India. Those with lower marks 
  were retained to govern England.

However, I'm willing to concede that I might be engaging in a bit of stereotyping. I'm not sure your actions can be legally or even logically justified, but I can say that I would probably do the same thing.

Short answer: No. Long answer: Yes. Correct Answer: It's a poor question. Given the limited data you provided, anyone here passing judgement is basing it off insufficient information. Furthermore, the information provided (a typo) doesn't make the described situation ("bad writing"). Furthermore, you provide no information regarding the candidate.

Anyone giving you an answer is doing so without all the information. Expecting an answer after providing such limited information is unreasonable.

I'm sure pretty much everyone here has worked with people, who don't know how to write English worth a damn. For example in my last job I worked with this Scandinavian dude, whose written English was atrocious. It was so bad we made jokes about it (with him, not at him). I had to repeatedly correct his writing.

But the dude was a brilliant technologist. Innovative, incredible work ethic and he just got s* done at an unbeliavable pace. The projects we were working on were much better off with him than without him.

Very capable, very smart and awesome to work with (most of the time), but can make some silly mistakes when writting in english... Specially on things that a spell checker wouldn't catch.

Not unfair, but you could miss a lot of good people by doing that.

I've seen many resumes that contain 1 or 2 small grammatical errors or typos. I don't get too hung up on those.

However, if the resume is poorly constructed overall, I usually won't choose that candidate for further consideration.

Every part of our jobs todays involves communications with others. I personally HATE chat-speak in email. "R u going 2 lunch 2day" drives me fucking bonkers, and I don't care if you're typing it on a phone where you have to tap 2 wires together to spell out the message in morse code. So, for me, I really don't want to interact with someone where every other communication is likely to make me want to strangle them. Similarly, even if they have poor English, I don't want people to require a decoder-ring to dissect their every message.

So, depending on the exact details of the resume, I would have probably done the same thing. The exceptions tend to be when you require a particular skill set that seems to be most predominant in someone that is not a native English speaker. EG: if I were hiring an expert on Russian social networks, I would not expect to find an ideal candidate that didn't also make some grammatical errors at times.

Communication gaps are like any other quality/time/scope/cost factor when managing people. If the lack of language skills aren't counterbalanced by brilliance in other areas, you'll end up with a net loss in investing in the employee.

Evaluating whether the poor language skills is a sign of being lazy, hasty, arrogant or simply from another native language group, you could miss a good deal of other high-value talents.

It doesn't take much to have another person review the thing for correctness. If you don't know anyone who can, spend the money to have a professional check it over.

If there is a huge stack of resumes and the chances of finding the right fit is good, then no harm to you.

But if (like everyone else) you are looking through a huge pile of chaff for the one right person who may not even be in the pile, then you are doing it wrong.

Nitpicking grammer, or paper color choice, or resume-writing skills in general, is probably not the critical skill your job requires (unless you are starting WriteYourResumeHere.co of course).