I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar

I cant imagine how people can manage to make it past 25 without learning the majority of the rules simply through diffusion; eventually being exposed too enough correct righting that they know the rules without even realizing they know them.

There are subtle rules that you might see but not understand which aren't obtainable through such a method, and those are ones that Im willing to forgive. I'm sure I make some of them my self.

Irregardless errors in fundamental and extremely obvious rules such as this post say too me I have never consumed my first language in writing willfully and may possibly have zero attention to detail.

Tell me you didn't cringe - then tell me that the clients, colleagues or superiors of our prospective hiree won't.

A guy on my team uses "undue" instead of "undo" in commit messages. He's a nice guy and as much as I'd like to, I can't repair the damage that does to my image of him; "do", "due" and how "un-" works are first grade material at the latest. I simply cannot understand such a mistake.

He wasn't all talk: way back in the day, he worked on emacs & authored fetchmail (fair warning: reading the fetchmail source will make your ears bleed.)

More on his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

People Who Use Poor Grammar should be: People Who Use Grammar Poorly.

I have a "zero tolerance approach" should be: I have a zero-tolerance approach.

people who mix up their itses should be: people who mix up its and it's.

passed over for a job — even if should be: passed over for a job—even if.

I don't point this out to be pedantic or to level at the author a tu quoque, but to point out that the idea of an "English grammar" that you can apply universally to writing is a myth. At best you can create a style guide, or follow an existing one. Expecting employees to be able to follow a known style guide is a reasonable request. Expecting them to score perfectly on a grammar test against a style guide they've never seen, without (presumably) computer assistance, when scored by someone who believes that they're capable of scoring a grammar test without recourse to existing style guides, is foolish, in exactly the same way that expecting a programmer to remember whether String.find take (needle, haystack) or (haystack, needle) as its arguments is a terrible interview technique.

For instance, while listing computer brands that include Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, Alienware, Compaq and ASUS, I wouldn't use the oxford comma. But if I'm listing out speaker brands like Bose, Klipsch, JBL, Bang and Olufsen, and Altec Lansing, I think oxford comma helps to clarify the meaning intended.