I’m having a piano delivered to my house. Arranging for a piano delivery is no small feat.  Besides making arrangements with the showroom, I had to coordinate the insurance with my apartment building’s managing agent and figure out if the piano would fit in my elevator. Delivering a baby seemed to be much easier than this ordeal.

The delivery was scheduled for tomorrow, yet the piano showed up at my house today. It seems that the employee from the piano showroom missed one minor detail…recording and communicating the correct delivery date to the movers. The piano arrived just as I was leaving my house for a meeting, so I had to refuse delivery and send the piano back to the showroom.

Ok, we’re all human and we all make mistakes. But in some situations you are going to be judged more harshly than others. If a delivery of new sheets or towels showed up on the wrong day, I might not have given it a second thought. But it’s hard to shrug off the fact that a 450 lb piano showed up on my doorstep unannounced. And even if the employee at the showroom is the employee of the year every year and is frequently praised for her attention to detail, to me she will always be “the lady who delivered a piano to my house on the wrong day.”

Job search is a situation where your actions are under a microscope. Errors that might be passed over in your day to day work are scrutinized much more diligently when hiring managers are reviewing applicants. When you start the job search process, an employer doesn’t know you and they don’t trust you yet. They don’t know if you are competent to do the job so each of your interactions with them either builds that trust or destroys it. Here are a few errors that job seekers often make and are frequently judged by.

• Resume typos…It’s very rare that I receive an email without a typo. And I see typos on websites and blogs all the time. And it doesn’t really color my opinion of that person. But in job search, typos on the resume make a red flag go up for many hiring managers. The concern is that if the applicant wasn’t detail-oriented enough to catch the typos in their resume, they may make other, more costly errors for the company.
• Fashion Faux-pas…Everyone has showed up at work at some point in time in some outfit that was far from flattering, too casual, inconsistent with the company’s corporate culture, or even offensive. In most cases the fashion faux-pas becomes fodder for the water cooler for a day or two and then just goes away. But on an interview, the candidate quickly turns into “the applicant in the fishnet stockings” or “the guy with the really bad tie” and again a judgement is passed. The concern is that based on the applicant’s dress they won’t fit in with the company’s culture or perhaps lack sound judgement in other areas.
• Arriving late to the interview… Just about everyone has been late to work at one time or another.  And unless it becomes a chronic issue, it is generally accepted and not a big deal. But on an interview, arriving late can signal to a hiring manager that you are not reliable or dependable or that you don’t manage your time well.
• Electronic whoops…We’ve all been in situations where someone’s cell phone rings during a presentation or important meeting. And maybe it’s a bit embarrassing but it’s quickly forgotten. However, if your phone rings during an interview, the interviewer notices and may pass a judgement about you or even your consideration of others.

When you apply for a job, you are a lot like a 450 lb piano. Everything you do is obvious. Everything you do gets noticed. And little errors in your job search strategy can quickly turn into detrimental ones. The person who arranged for my piano delivery should have checked and double checked the delivery date…because it’s a piano. Job seekers need to check and recheck all the little details that go into an effective job search…because it’s your career. Both are really big things that you don’t want to screw up.