CV Howlers: What NOT to write on your CV – THE RESULTS

MD of Personal Career Management Corinne Mills has completed a CV survey and has found that over 90% of CV’s had an error due to spelling, grammar or format and 25% of the CV’s were badly presented.

See below some of the alarming disclosures found when crawling through the CV’s –

“A director with a strong breath”

“Baker, working on ovens and customers”

“I’m looking manly for an IT role”

“Brought in by American company to take control of the UK”

What was more surprising was that most of these CV’s were not junior applicants, but CEO’s, senior professionals and recent graduates.

With today’s tough job market it is more important than ever to ensure you have an error free CV and that it shows you are capable of doing the job.

Here are the statistics from our CV survey:

Statistics	Number	% of total
Total number of CVs reviewed	500
CVs with errors due to spelling, grammar or format	462	92%
Spelling only	14	3%
Grammar only	199	40%
Format only	64	13%
Spelling and grammar	25	5%
Grammar and formatting	97	19%
Spelling and formatting	4	1%
All three	19	4%
Format too long	40	8%
Number of pages per CV
1	5	1%
2	164	33%
3	208	42%
4	79	16%
more than 4	43	9%
Longest CV	11 pages
(Correct number of pages for a CV is 2)
Choosing to give date of birth	139	28%
Choosing to give family details e.g married with children	137	27%
Choosing to give nationality	130	26%

Examples of most common mistakes

• Tenses: switching
  from present to past and vice versa for no reason or just bad use. E.g. “I have
  ran the London Marathon”
• Apostrophes:
  “Tesco’s”, “saving 100,000’s of dollars”, “KPI’s”, “it’s” instead of “its”
• Ellipses in all
  their forms. Misuse and “..”
• Capitalising random
  words mid-sentence
• Variations in page
  margins or text alignment

Caps:

• “which encompasses
  Travel and transport”
• “…and pitch
  capabilities, Implemented a highly effective…”
• “I Initiated”
• “all Rooms”
• “revamped all food
  and Beverage”

Formatting:

• Bad spacing, e.g.
  “to Ore , 134km long”, “9staff”
• Change in font and
  font size
• Switching between
  “and” and “&”
• Section headers at
  the very bottom of pages with section content overleaf very common.
• Mixed styles of
  bullet points / erratic alignment
• Lack of consistency
  formatting dates, switching from full dates to abbreviations and, within
  abbreviations, switching between /, ., – and ~

CV Howler Press Release

Corinne Mills has relaunched her CV book ‘You’re Hired! How to write a brilliant CV’ which you can purchase from Amazon. Her updated book includes a new chapter on looking at how to maximize the benefits of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels.

Corinne works with individuals on a 1-1 basis providing career coaching and outplacement services helping job seekers to establish what their next career move should be and supports them in their job search.

For more information on our CV survey or to find out about our CV writing services please call Personal Career Management on 01753 888995 or fill in our online contact form.

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