A recruiter makes a decision after just 6 seconds of looking at our CV. Most recruiters don't have time to read a CV thoroughly. So it's important to plan it well in all its aspects.
Did you know that: Google receives over 1,000,000 CVs a year. That's 2,700 a day.
Before we send our CV, we need to ask ourselves two important questions. Is this job right for us? Do you have adequate experience for the position you're applying for?
Imagine a doctor who "embellishes" their CV. Even the best CV won't cover gaps in experience, so take that into account when choosing the position you want to apply for. If you answered the questions positively, you can increase your chances by avoiding 5 simple mistakes in your CV:
Mistake #1: Listing duties instead of achievements
List achievements, not duties
Duties never sound as good as achievements. The very word "achievement" is already more positively charged than "duty". So limit yourself to listing what you achieved instead of what you did.
What counts as an achievement? That depends on you and how you phrase it. In some cases it may not be easy to point to achievements, so you can try to better specify the amount of work put into a given task.
E.g. instead of "my duties included writing user manuals", you can phrase it as "I created a manual thanks to which x (maybe you have access to some statistics measuring your work) people didn't have to call the hotline, I estimate it saved the company approx. £0,000."
You don't have to be that precise — even just "I created a manual that helped…", or "I helped achieve [...] a result." sounds much better than the first version.
Mistake #2: No information about interests
Interests that will grab attention
Of course not all hobbies will pay off in the recruiter's eyes, but if you like playing a sport it's worth boasting about it. Pay attention to whether teamwork isn't part of your hobby, or whether you had a chance to perform publicly somewhere. That may interest the recruiter.
Mistake #3: An unengaging CV
Let's go back to the 6 seconds a recruiter devotes to our CV. You can list your achievements one by one, but you can go a step further and highlight them, or add abbreviations to your list. E.g. the ad reached x people.
Make sure all of this fits on one A4 page and is easy to print. If you have little space, remove experiences whose skills are already repeated, choose the more prestigious ones.
Mistake #4: Presenting skills on charts
The most common CV mistakes and how to avoid them
Enlivening your CV with graphics or some chart is a bad idea. Even if it makes our CV stand out, skills aren't measurable and it makes no sense. What could a skill at a level of 7 out of 10 mean? 10 of what? We don't know.
There's also a second reason, the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect — a psychological phenomenon in which people who are unskilled in some area of life tend to overestimate their skills in that area, while highly skilled people tend to underestimate their skills.
That's why it's better to present your skills through experience, or to score them, but not to rate them.
Mistake #5: Using one CV for every job
Of course sometimes the deadline for sending a CV is pressing and then it's worth having a "ready" version, but if we have a bit of time to prepare better, it's worth doing so.
Start with thorough research of the market you want to work in. Look through what skills employers are looking for, which ones most often repeat in job ads in your field, and acquire those skills, and if you already have them, make sure you've included them in your CV.
For different companies your experiences may carry different weight. Pay attention to that and choose them carefully.
Terms from the article
CV — Computer Vision. A field of AI enabling the analysis of images and video. CV systems can recognize objects, text, scenes, faces, graphics quality, and generate descriptions of visual materials.
Why it matters: It allows a machine to see what's in a photo: a product, a face, text, a logo. In a newsroom it speeds up describing, tagging and selecting thousands of photos.
When it's used: For automatic photo descriptions (ALT), graphic moderation, logo recognition and organizing archives.
What's the risk of omitting it: Without computer vision, every graphic is described and catalogued by a human — a photo archive without descriptions is practically unsearchable.
Summary
The article lists 5 key CV mistakes: instead of a list of duties, show achievements, add interesting hobbies, ensure an engaging form, avoid subjective skill charts and tailor the document to each offer. A recruiter decides about a candidate after just 6 seconds, and Google receives over 1,000,000 CVs a year.
An interesting note is the reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect — unskilled people overestimate their competences, while experts underestimate them, which is why charts rating skills on a 1–10 scale make no sense in a recruiter's eyes.
