You have a maximum of 30 seconds for your CV to grab a recruiter’s attention. Make it count!
Rejected CV: 1. A Ridiculous Email Address
You may be a fan of Shahrukh Khan, but do you need really need to use this simply daft email address –Ravi.ddlj@yahoo.com
Email addresses like this should be kept for private use. It takes 5 minutes to set up a ‘professional sounding’ email address via any free email providers.
We see some real shocking email addresses and they give us an instant negative perception of a candidate. Try to stick to using your name with an email address. What a shame it would be to be the perfect fit for a position only to fall at the first hurdle because of your ‘funny’ email address?
Rejected CV: 2. Spelling & Grammar
Rejected CV: 3. Formatting
Rejected CV: 4. Silly Fonts
We get so many CVs where people go a bit ‘artistic’ and use 5 different fonts in all the colours of the rainbow. The golden CV rule is to keep to one single easy to read font like Calibri, Arial or the newspaper font of choice, Times New Roman and to keep the font black. Avoid those hard to read fonts like Blackadder ITC or ugly fonts like Comic Sans. And try and keep the font size to at least 10. Reducing the size to 8, it probably indicates that your CV is too busy.
Rejected CV: 5. Misleading Information
All businesses are now carrying out extensive background checks prior to taking somebody on board. Nearly everybody embellishes their achievements in jobs on their CV, but stretching the truth could land you in hot water. We have seen many candidates trip themselves up, with the most common misleading information being put on CVs being:
- The inaccuracy of dates to try and cover up job hopping or unexplained gaps in employment
- Inflated education achievements, including purchasing online/distance degrees which are worthless
- Inflated salaries
- Exaggerated job titles
- Exaggerated career accomplishments
- Blatant lies in regards to roles and duties