Your CV is your first impression to recruiters so it needs to be strong, attract recruiters’ attention, and entice them to further your application through the hiring process.
With recruiters reviewing hundreds of CVs, you need to stand out from the competition, if you want to land your dream career, and there are certain things you should be avoiding.
Before producing your next CV, make sure you’re side-stepping these CV errors.
Big chunks of text
Your CV should facilitate ease of reading, enabling recruiters to simply navigate your applicable experience, showcasing your suitability for the sector you’re pursuing. Large blocks of text can become tedious to read, resulting in essential information being lost within bulky chunks of content.
Use bold headers, bullet points and distinctive sections to break up information, highlighting key aspects of your experience. Displaying your marketable strengths to recruiters without them having to dig through reams of information.
Make it easier for recruiters to pinpoint your relevancy for the industry you’re applying to at first glance.
Clichés
If you want to stand out from the competition, you need to be unique in your descriptions, tailoring yourself to the industry you’re considering. Avoid cliché and overused statements such as “I always give 110%” or “I am a hardworking, dedicated individual” that add no additional value to your CV and make you blend into the crowd.
Recruiters have read these statements countless times and seeing them in your CV could cause them to switch off. Use examples to demonstrate your core skills, bringing them to life for recruiters in a more engaging way. Instead of clichés, add keywords from your industry research, appealing to recruiters and emphasising your relevancy for positions.
A lack of numbers
Take your examples to the next level by including relevant facts and figures. Numbers help to validate your examples for recruiters, giving more context around your applicableness for roles. Facts help strengthen your CV, assisting recruiters in recognising your core achievements.
For example, instead of stating you increased sales within your last organisation, go further by asserting “I brought in 15 new clients to the business, producing £250,000 in revenue.”
Consider adding numbers in terms of dates, percentages when documenting improvements you made within an organisation, financials, whether you supported in increasing sales or reducing costs or even the size of the businesses you were part of. These will all give recruiters further insight.
Grammar mistakes
When crafting your CV, checking and even double checking your CV is imperative to ensuring the information you provided is accurate, and your spelling and grammar is correct. Spelling or grammar mistakes show a lack of attention to detail and care in your CV, which is a bad first impression to give to recruiters.
You want your first impression to be strong, and submitting a CV without reviewing it first can distract from the core aspects in your CV that make you the ideal candidate for positions. Always get someone to give your CV a once over, before sending it off.
About the Author
Andrew Fennell is the founder of CV writing advice website StandOut CV – he is a former recruitment consultant and contributes careers advice to websites like Business Insider, The Guardian and FastCompany.