Grammatical error on application form.

[Waterhorse46]

Last week I applied for a role I wanted. The application time frame had closed and I contacted the school. They asked me to submit a speculative application having spoken to the HR team. They contacted me twice after this to encourage me to submit this. So I did. I worked so hard on the application – it’s a leadership role in a school I really liked, and I put everything into it. I checked, checked, and checked again before submitting.

Today I logged into the portal to see if there were any updates, and when I looked at my submitted application I realised the first word was missing. The statement now starts with an incomplete lowercase error.

I know it wasn’t like that when I submitted it. I checked thoroughly, and I’m certain the software must have removed the first word when it uploaded. It’s been over a week and I’ve heard nothing, so I’m taking the silence as my answer. But I feel so disheartened – I really wanted this opportunity and now it feels like I’ve ruined my chances.

Opportunities like this don’t come up often in my area, and it was l a role in the English department as a team leader, which makes it look even worse. It wasn’t a sloppy application at all, I just didn’t copy and paste it correctly.

It’s been a week now. Do I just need to make my peace with it?

I think if you're an English teacher and the rest of the statement is fine, they'll just assume it's an error.

Recruiting takes ages. The admin staff needs to prepare all the applications, two or three people need to score them and then meet to decide who to shortlist, and then the admin staff need to send out interview letters. In theory it can all be done very quickly (and a portal may speed up parts of it if it automatically prepares applications for shortlisting - we had nothing that fancy in my HR job a few years ago!) but in practice it usually isn't.

I'd give it a couple of weeks at least before getting disheartened. You could send an email to clarify - I imagine it will give you peace of mind, and it's unlikely to hurt.

Honestly if they want to hire you they will. This is an absolute non issue. Contacting them about it will just draw attention to it and make it look worse. At best if you do contact them, keep it casual. “I’ve just noticed the first word has been deleted during submission, it should obviously say xxxx”. Don’t be writing a formal letter and apologising. You’ll come across as high maintenance

Errors are easy to make I'm sure they've seen worse on other applications.

My point exactly 😂