The ten most common CV mistakes to avoid

Posted in Candidates

Less than 1 in 10 CVs received by The Works in response to advertised positions are good enough for their consultants to consider contacting.

Whilst target searches and headhunting allow us to deliver the quality of candidates required, there’s a lot you can do to ensure your CV makes the grade, not the reject pile.

Here, we highlight the ten most common CV mistakes to avoid:

1. Don’t include your date of birth. Even without age discrimination legislation, it’s irrelevant. A company wants to know about your experience, what makes you better than your peers and how you can deliver quantifiable results, not how many candles you’ll be blowing out next birthday.
2. Unnecessary personal information such as marital status, number of pets, children’s names. Ditto mundane personal profiles.
3. Photos of yourself. Save them for Facebook. Or your mantelpiece.
4. Outdated work experience. Again, irrelevant. Yes, even that three weeks delivering newspapers in 1987.
5. Jargon and abbreviations that only you and your current work colleagues understand.
6. Colour. Textures. Glitter. OK, the last one’s an exaggeration but you get the gist. Don’t make it pretty. It’s a document, not a work of art.
7. 5 page CVs. The CV is a door opener, not a literary tome. Two pages maximum is an industry standard for a reason. That means no purple prose, no listing off responsibilities taken from your job spec. Bullet points can help, though.
8. Using the third person. Unless you’re royalty, of course.
9. Spelling mistakes. With stiff competition and hiring deadlines, including a spelling mistake is an instant rejection, fast-tracking your CV to the shredder. Take particular care of the word ‘liaise’. Liaise. Liaison. Liaising. No creative alternatives, please.
10. Weird interests can make you look like an oddball to those who don’t share them. Cultural fit is one of the criteria employers will be looking for.