Recruitment Note Clean-Up
Rohan, an intern at a recruitment firm, drafts this note for candidates: 'Dear Candidate, Your application for the post of Management Trainee have been received. The role requires excellent communication skills, a willingness to learn, and you should be able to work in shifts. Candidates who have applied before need not to apply again. The interview will be held on 12 June at 10 a.m. in the morning. Kindly bring your resume, original documents, and two passport photographs. The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of caste, religion, gender, or disability. Only shortlisted candidates will be communicated.' The HR manager finds the note grammatically uneven and, in one place, ambiguous about who must reapply. She also wants a firmer but polite tone for the deadline.
1. Identify four grammatical or usage errors in the note and give the corrected version of each.
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Subject-verb agreement: 'Your application ... have been received' should be 'Your application ... has been received' because the subject is singular 'application', not 'skills' or 'documents'.
Modal + infinitive: 'need not to apply' should be 'need not apply'. After 'need not', use the bare infinitive.
Redundancy: 'at 10 a.m. in the morning' should be 'at 10 a.m.' because 'a.m.' already means before noon.
Wrong verb: 'Only shortlisted candidates will be communicated' should be 'Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted'. In this sense, 'communicate' needs an object or a preposition; 'contacted' is the standard phrasing.
A fifth issue is faulty parallelism: 'excellent communication skills, a willingness to learn, and you should be able to work in shifts' should be 'excellent communication skills, a willingness to learn, and the ability to work in shifts'.
2. The sentence 'Candidates who have applied before need not apply again' is ambiguous. State two readings and rewrite it for a specific post.
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Reading 1: anyone who has ever applied to the company for any post need not apply again. Reading 2: anyone who applied for this same Management Trainee post in an earlier recruitment cycle need not submit a fresh application.
The intended meaning is usually Reading 2. A precise rewrite is: 'Candidates who applied for this Management Trainee post in the previous recruitment cycle do not need to submit a fresh application.'
If Reading 1 were intended, the note would need to say: 'Candidates who have previously applied to this company for any post need not apply for this post.' The original sentence leaves the scope of 'before' and 'applied' unclear.
3. Rewrite the first four sentences as a concise, polite paragraph of no more than 55 words. State whether you would retain the equal-opportunity sentence in that paragraph, and why.
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Rewrite: 'Dear Candidate, we have received your application for the post of Management Trainee. The role requires excellent communication skills, a willingness to learn and the ability to work in shifts. If you applied for this post in the previous cycle, you need not reapply. Interviews will be held on 12 June at 10 a.m.'
This is 54 words. I would not put the equal-opportunity sentence in this opening paragraph. It is a policy statement, not a shortlisting instruction, and it interrupts the practical flow. Retain it in a footer or a separate 'About the employer' section so that it remains visible without crowding the deadline information.