10 CV Mistakes That Cost You the Interview — and How to Check for Each One
Most CV advice is unfalsifiable. "Use strong action verbs" and "tailor it to the role" are true, useless, and impossible to check. This list is the opposite: ten mistakes that are either present in your CV or not, each with a test you can run in under a minute. Several of them you can only really see by running the document through something that reads it the way software does, which is the last item.
1. The current role is not visible in the first five seconds
Whoever opens your CV is deciding one thing first: roughly what are you, and roughly how senior. If that takes a paragraph of prose to establish, you have spent your best real estate on nothing.
The test: cover everything below the top third of page one. Can a stranger say your job title, your current employer and your years of experience? If not, that is the fix, and it is a layout fix rather than a writing one.
2. Achievements are buried inside responsibilities
"Responsible for managing the regional budget" tells a reader what you were supposed to do. "Cut regional spend 14% while holding headcount" tells them what happened. The first is a job description; the second is evidence.
The test: count the numbers in your experience section. Not percentages specifically — any figure at all: money, headcount, volume, time, percentage. If a fifteen-year career contains fewer than five, you are describing duties, not results.
The fix is not to invent figures. It is to go back through what you actually did and recover the ones that existed. Nobody can check a number you made up until interview, at which point it is much worse than not having had one.
3. The layout collapses when the text changes length
A CV built by nudging text boxes in Word looks fine until you add a job. Then a heading orphans onto its own page, a column overflows, and the document you send is not the document you designed.
The test: add a fictional two-line bullet to your oldest role and look at every page break. Then delete it. If the document reflowed badly, it will do the same thing the next time you edit it under time pressure, which is always the week you actually need it.
4. The file is a picture of a CV
Exported from Canva, scanned from a printout, or assembled as an image, a CV can look immaculate and contain no selectable text at all. To anything that reads it automatically, the document is blank.
The test: open the PDF and try to select a line of text with your cursor. If nothing highlights, no software can read a word of it, and neither can the search box a recruiter uses to find you in their database three months later.
5. Dates that do not survive arithmetic
Overlapping roles, a gap you meant to explain, a leaving date you updated in one place and not the other. These are rarely dishonest and always damaging, because the reader cannot tell the difference between a typo and a cover-up.
The test: write your roles out as a plain list of start and end dates, in order, and read down the column. Errors that are invisible inside a designed layout are obvious in a single column of numbers.
6. A personal statement that would fit anyone
"A hard-working and dedicated professional with excellent communication skills." Delete your name from that sentence and it describes four million people.
The test: read your opening paragraph and ask whether any specific claim in it could be false about someone else in your field. If nothing in it could be false about anyone, it carries no information, and it is occupying the most-read part of the page.
7. Two documents that disagree with each other
Your CV says you left in March. Your LinkedIn says June. Your CV lists a qualification your profile does not. Nobody assumes malice, but they do notice, and it makes every other claim feel softer.
The test: open both side by side and compare employers, titles and dates only. It takes two minutes and it is the single highest-value proofread available to you.
8. Formatting that changes on someone else's computer
A Word file uses a font your reader does not have, so their machine substitutes one, and your careful two-page document becomes a ragged three. You never see this happen. They never mention it.
The test: send it to yourself, open it on a different device, and look at the page count. If it moved, send PDF instead — or send both, and let the reader pick. Some agencies genuinely need the editable file.
9. Everything is emphasised, so nothing is
Bold, italics, underline, three colours, five heading sizes, a full-width skills bar chart with no scale. Emphasis works by contrast; applied everywhere, it flattens into noise and costs you the one thing you actually wanted noticed.
The test: print page one in greyscale. If you cannot immediately see the three things you most want read, the hierarchy is decorative rather than functional.
10. You have never seen what a machine reads from it
This is the one nobody checks, and it silently causes several of the others. Your CV is not read once by a person — it is parsed into fields by software, filed, and searched later. What matters is which text landed in which field.
A two-column layout can interleave your employer and your dates into one unreadable string. A header can put your phone number somewhere the parser never looks. A job title styled as a heading can be read as a section name. You cannot see any of this by looking at the document, because it looks correct.
The test: run the file through something that shows you the extracted record rather than a score. You want the actual fields — name, current employer, dates, each role — and ideally where on the page each value came from, so you can see which ones the software guessed at. That is what our free conversion does: one CV, no card, and you get the structured record with confidence on each field, alternative readings where the parser was unsure, and the original page alongside it.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a CV be in the UK?
Two pages for most roles, and length is rarely the real problem. A tight two pages beats a padded one and a rambling three. If you are over, cut the oldest roles down to a line each rather than shrinking the font — reducing type size is how a two-page CV becomes an unreadable one.
Do I need a different CV for every application?
You need a different top third. The opening summary and the ordering of your most recent role should reflect the job you are applying for; the employment history underneath rarely needs to change. That is a ten-minute edit rather than a rewrite, which is why people actually do it.
Is it worth paying someone to write my CV?
Sometimes, but check what you are buying. A writer cannot know your figures better than you do, and the mistakes on this list are structural — layout, dates, parseability — rather than literary. Fix those first and see whether you still need prose help.
Try it on a real CV
Turn a candidate's own CV into a branded client submission you can check before it leaves the building. No card required, and every AI change is shown as a diff you approve before sending.
ConnectIQ — branded CV formatting for recruitment teams. One free conversion, no card.