First impressions really do count, and when applying for a job the first impression of you is your CV. A CV can be considered to be the applicant’s shop window and therefore employers expect job seekers to spend enough time ensuring that their CV's stand out for the right reason.
Common mistakes often seen on CV’s
1. Poor spelling, poor formatting and bad grammar.
2. Many job seekers take a “scatter gun approach” by sending the same CV out en masse without tailoring each CV to a specific position.
3. The CV's are too long.
4. The CV's don’t have the details of the current employer.
5. The CV has different names than that of the job seeker’s because the job seeker forgot to change the name that was on the CV template used.
6. The cover letter is addressed to a different company.
7. Meaningless profiles such as “Energetic, highly motivated and hard-working self-starter who can deal with people at all levels of the organisation.”
8. Meaningless career objectives such as “To obtain a challenging position with a great company where I can grow my skills and career.”
9. Use of jargon such as “strategic”, “self-motivated”, “innovative” and “dynamic” that doesn’t indicate the job seeker’s accomplishments.
Tips:
1. Prepare a CV (and cover letter) that is specific for each job being applied for.
2. Use spellcheck.
3. Since spellcheck doesn’t pick up all the spelling mistakes, getting another person to read the CV is advisable.
4. Do something that makes your CV stand out.
Read about the FAB-Quotient here and learn how to be a healthier version of yourself.
