Kelly Services has issued simple guidelines to help candidates brush up on their grammatical skills after research found that many struggle to cope with it.

Director of corporate sales and marketing, Steve Girdler, says: “We also took 171 of our own candidates’ CVs and analysed them. Unfortunately there were only eight that did not contain any errors, the remainder containing an average of 14 errors, largely grammatical.”

It found that just under half of candidates cannot deal consistently with the apostrophe and 91% correctly managed to pick the correct form of the use of ‘I’ or ‘me’.

It found that 46% of candidates felt that they did need to improve, but only 2% felt that they could ask their employer, so were left with a variety of choices from learning from a book or using a computer programme to enrolling on a grammar course.