Career Tools - 5 Common CV Mistakes
5 Common CV Mistakes to Remove Now
When writing an effective CV, the details you leave out; are just as important as the details you include. If you have any of the following blunders in your own CV then be sure to remove them if you want to avoid being rejected by employers.
Embarrassing email addresses
All too often candidates will scar the top of an otherwise good CV with a ridiculous email address that may have seemed cool when it was created, but now just looks a bit silly. This is fine to use if you're emailing friends but a CV is a professional document and the first impression of you that a potential future employer will see. An email address like badboy4life@gmail.com will really make recruiters question your professionalism and they will be reluctant to contact you. Set up a separate work email account if necessary, just using your full name or a close variation as the address.
Photographs
Unless you are an actor or model, then having a photograph on your CV is completely unnecessary. Employers need to know what skills and experience you can bring to their organisation - they aren't interested in what you look like, so photographs waste valuable CV space that would be better used by filling with compelling text that explains your value.
Meaningless clichés
Your CV should be filled with hard factual content that conveys your skills, experience and knowledge to the reader so that they can really understand what you do. Phrases such as "works well in a team or individual" and "go-getter with a can do attitude" are essentially meaningless and don't actually tell the reader anything about you. Experienced recruiters will have seen every phrase in the cliché book and none will impress them; so stick to fact based material throughout your CV.
Unnecessary pages
Busy recruiters and hiring managers do not have the time to wade through 7 page CV's. They need to extract the information they need quickly, so keep your CV short, sharp and to-the-point; breaking information up into manageable, clearly headed sections and using bullet points where possible. Ideally you want to keep the CV to 2 pages in length; definitely no longer than 3.
Poor grammar
Whilst the spellcheck feature's appearance in the majority of word processing packages has largely removed the risk of making spelling errors in CV's; many people become reliant on them and do not bother to proofread their CV's before distributing. However there are lots of errors that the spellcheck may not pick up such as poor language or the incorrect use of a word (Using Your instead of You're for example). Spend some time proofreading your CV because it only takes one mistake for a recruiter to start doubting your credibility.
Author: Andrew Fennell is the Director of London based CV Writing Service - StandOut CV