Common CV Mistakes: 17 Fixes Before You Apply

A weak profile uses broad claims that could sit on almost any CV. Phrases such as “hard-working professional”, “excellent communicator”, or “motivated individual” do not give the reader a reason to trust you. They sound neat, but they do not explain your level, target role, strongest experience, or likely value.

A better profile gives the reader a short route into the rest of the CV. It should show the role you are targeting, the experience or transferable strengths that make you credible, and one or two proof points that matter for the job.

Weak version:

Motivated and reliable individual with excellent communication skills and a passion for delivering results.

Better version:

Customer support adviser with three years’ experience handling high-volume email, phone, and live chat queries for retail and subscription services. Confident resolving complaints, documenting issues in Zendesk, and improving first-contact resolution through clearer knowledge-base notes.

The second version is not longer for the sake of it. It tells the recruiter where the candidate fits, what environments they know, and which evidence to expect next. For more detailed profile help, use the canonical guide to CV personal statement examples.

Your contact section should be quick and clean. Include your name, phone number, professional email address, general location, and a relevant LinkedIn or portfolio link if it strengthens the application. Do not make the recruiter search for your email in a footer, image, or decorative sidebar.

Avoid personal information that is not needed for shortlisting. In the UK, you normally do not need to include your date of birth, age, marital status, nationality, full home address, photo, National Insurance number, or personal ID details. The National Careers Service advises including practical contact details and avoiding details such as age, date of birth, marital status, and nationality.

The fix is simple: keep the contact line functional. For most applications, this is enough:

Aisha Khan | Birmingham | 07700 900000 | aisha.khan@email.co.uk | linkedin.com/in/aishakhan

This makes the CV easier to use and reduces the risk of unnecessary personal data sitting in every application file.

A baseline CV is useful as a working document, but it is rarely the version you should send. If the advert asks for stakeholder management, Excel reporting, diary coordination, safeguarding awareness, or customer complaint handling, the CV should make the closest evidence visible quickly.

Tailoring does not mean inventing experience. It means changing the emphasis, order, and wording so the employer can see the match. The National Careers Service recommends looking at the job advert, essential criteria, and company details before tailoring the CV to the role.

Before sending, highlight five to eight phrases from the advert that genuinely apply to you. Then check whether those ideas appear naturally in your profile, skills section, and recent experience bullets. If they are absent, the CV may be accurate but still too broad.

For a deeper tailoring process, use how to match your CV to a job description.

Recruiters often skim before they read. If your strongest proof appears at the bottom of page two, the CV may never earn the attention needed to reach it. This is common when candidates leave old education, generic skills, or routine duties above more relevant achievements.

Move the most useful evidence closer to the top. In a recent role, lead with the bullet that best matches the target job, not the bullet that describes the most obvious duty. If you are changing career, bring transferable projects, short courses, volunteering, or relevant freelance work higher up. If you are early in your career, move education above experience only when it is the strongest evidence for the role.

When fixing common CV mistakes, the order should answer the shortlisting question first. What does this employer need to see before they decide whether to keep reading?

Duties tell the reader what sat in your job description. Results tell them what your work achieved. A duties-only CV can be accurate and still weak because it does not separate you from everyone else who held a similar role.

Weak bullet:

• Responsible for dealing with customer enquiries.

Better bullet:

• Resolved 40-60 customer enquiries per day across phone and email, using clear notes in Zendesk to reduce repeat contacts and speed up handovers.

Not every result needs a revenue number. You can show evidence through volume, complexity, quality, speed, risk, compliance, customer outcomes, team support, or process improvement.

Useful evidence prompts include:

• How many people, cases, tickets, orders, students, patients, clients, or projects did you support?
• What tools, systems, standards, or processes did you use?
• What became faster, safer, clearer, more accurate, more organised, or more consistent?
• Which problems did you handle without constant supervision?
• What would your manager trust you with again?

If you need a structured way to rewrite bullets, use the guide to work experience on a CV.

Numbers can strengthen a CV, but only when they are clear and credible. A vague number can look like decoration. A huge number with no context can raise doubts. A number that is irrelevant to the role can distract from better evidence.

Use numbers to clarify scope, not to make every bullet look dramatic. “Managed a £35,000 monthly stock budget” is useful if the role involves operations, retail, purchasing, or stock control. “Increased satisfaction by 300%” is less useful if you cannot explain the baseline or method.

When you do not have formal metrics, use practical measures. You might include shift size, number of sites, customer volume, caseload, order volume, event attendance, team size, reporting frequency, audit results, response times, or the number of stakeholders you coordinated.

Good CV evidence sounds like something a manager would recognise. Avoid inflated claims that you could not comfortably discuss at interview.

A CV becomes dull when every bullet follows the same rhythm: “responsible for”, “worked on”, “helped with”, “assisted in”. Repetition makes the experience section feel copied from a job description rather than selected for this application.

Vary the evidence. Use one bullet for scope, one for a result, one for tools or technical skill, one for stakeholder work, and one for problem solving. This creates a fuller picture without adding length.

For example, instead of five admin bullets that all say you “managed” something, you might show:

• diary coordination across three directors,
• invoice checks using Xero,
• meeting notes and action tracking,
• supplier communication,
• a filing or onboarding process you improved.

The content becomes easier to trust because each bullet has a different job.

Gaps do not automatically ruin a CV. The mistake is leaving a confusing gap without context, or writing a long explanation that distracts from your current fit. Prospects notes that employers understand candidates have responsibilities and life events outside work, and that gaps can often be reframed through learning, volunteering, caring responsibilities, freelance work, or reskilling.

Use a short, calm line where the gap would otherwise raise questions. Then bring the focus back to readiness and relevant evidence.

Examples:

• Career break for family care, 2023-2024. Maintained sector knowledge through online bookkeeping courses and volunteer treasurer work.
• Redundancy and job search period, 2025. Completed Google Analytics training and supported a local charity with campaign reporting.
• Health-related career break, 2024. Now ready to return; recent short course and volunteering experience refreshed customer service skills.

Avoid apologising. Avoid oversharing medical or family detail. The aim is to remove uncertainty and help the reader understand what you can do now. For more guidance, link the issue to how to explain employment gaps.

Older roles can still matter, but they should not crowd out more relevant evidence. A common problem is giving a job from ten years ago the same space as a recent role that matches the advert better.

Trim older or less relevant roles into short summaries. Keep the job title, employer, dates, and one short line if the experience still supports the application. Use fuller bullets for the last 5-10 years or the roles most connected to your target.

This is especially important for career changers. You do not need to delete your background, but you should stop old evidence from controlling the page. The CV should show where you are going next, not only where you have been.

A CV should be clean before it is clever. Heavy graphics, icons, columns, text boxes, tiny fonts, and decorative charts may look attractive, but they can make the CV harder to scan and less reliable in applicant tracking systems.

Use a simple structure: clear headings, consistent spacing, readable font size, bullet points, and reverse chronological order where appropriate. The National Careers Service recommends clear fonts, consistent style, headings, bullet points, and clear wording. Prospects gives similar formatting advice, including using clear section headings and concise bullet points.

Design should help the evidence travel. If a visual element does not make the recruiter’s task easier, remove it.

Most UK job applications work best with one to two pages. One page can suit early-career, part-time, retail, hospitality, or simple role applications. Two pages suit most experienced candidates. Longer CVs can be appropriate for academic, medical, research, or senior technical careers, but only when the extra detail is relevant.

Length is not the real measure. Use enough space to show fit without making the reader dig. A two-page CV full of sharp evidence is better than a one-page CV that removes important proof. A one-page CV that is focused is better than two pages of repeated duties.

Cut what does not help the decision: old responsibilities, generic interests, duplicated skills, school detail that no longer matters, and long paragraphs. Keep what makes the interview more likely.

Spelling mistakes are not the only CV problem, but they are easy to avoid and quick to notice. Errors matter most when the role needs written communication, attention to detail, compliance, administration, customer emails, reports, teaching material, or client-facing work.

Run three checks:

1. Read the CV aloud to catch missing words.
2. Check dates, job titles, employer names, qualification names, and contact details manually.
3. Ask someone else to read it, especially if you have edited the same document several times.

Do not rely only on spellcheck. It may miss the wrong company name, inconsistent dates, duplicated bullets, or an email address typed incorrectly.

The file name is a tiny detail, but it can still help or hurt. “CV final final v7.pdf” looks careless. “Document.pdf” creates admin friction. Use a simple file name that identifies you and the document.

Good examples:

• Maya-Patel-CV.pdf
• Daniel-Reed-Project-Manager-CV.docx
• Priya-Shah-Teaching-Assistant-CV.pdf

Check the advert for file format instructions. If the employer asks for Word, send Word. If they ask for PDF, send PDF. If there is no instruction, PDF usually preserves layout, but some portals prefer DOCX. When in doubt, follow the platform guidance.

A CV is not a background-check form. Keep it focused on employability evidence. Do not add sensitive details unless the employer specifically asks through the proper process or the information is genuinely relevant and safe to share.

GOV.UK guidance for employers says recruiters must not ask candidates about protected characteristics, marital status, children, or plans to have children during recruitment. It also says date of birth should only be requested on an application form when a certain age is a legal requirement for the job. As a candidate, you can reduce unnecessary exposure by keeping the CV limited to relevant professional information.

The ICO’s recruitment and selection guidance also highlights that recruitment can involve sensitive candidate data, including health, diversity, and criminal conviction information. That is another reason to avoid putting unnecessary private information into a document that may be stored, forwarded, or uploaded.

Start with the top third of page one. Rewrite the profile so it names the target role, relevant background, and two proof points. Then edit the first skills row and the first two bullets under the most recent relevant role.

This small pass can change how the whole CV feels. A recruiter who sees fit quickly is more likely to give the rest of the page a fair read.

Use this 30-minute order:

1. Check contact details and file name.
2. Rewrite the profile.
3. Move the most relevant skills higher.
4. Rewrite the first two experience bullets.
5. Remove one irrelevant line from page one.

Add a tailoring pass. Print or open the job advert beside the CV. Mark the essential criteria, role-specific tools, qualifications, and repeated keywords. Then check whether each one is reflected accurately.

Do not force every advert word into the CV. Prioritise the ones that matter most and are true of your experience. Adjust section order if needed. A candidate for a project coordinator job may need project tracking and stakeholder updates higher than general admin. A candidate for a care role may need safeguarding, personal care, medication support, and documentation more visible than unrelated retail duties.

Fix the experience section properly. For each relevant role, choose three to six bullets that show different types of evidence: scope, outcomes, tools, collaboration, problem solving, and reliability. Remove repeated duties. Add practical numbers where they clarify scale.

Then proofread slowly. Check dates, tense, spacing, punctuation, section headings, and file format. Open the exported file on another device or viewer if possible. Make sure the layout survives outside your editing screen.

This is also the right moment to compare the CV with how to write a CV and CV structure if the whole document still feels unclear.

Before:

I am a reliable and enthusiastic person with good communication skills and experience in busy environments.

After:

Retail supervisor with five years’ experience leading shifts, resolving customer issues, training new starters, and maintaining stock accuracy in high-footfall stores. Confident using EPOS systems, planning rotas, and improving team standards during seasonal peaks.

Why it works: the revised version gives role context, scope, tools, and responsibilities. It still sounds human, but it is no longer generic.

Before:

• Responsible for social media content.

After:

• Planned and scheduled three weekly LinkedIn and Instagram posts, using engagement data to improve product-launch content and increase average post interactions by 22% over one quarter.

Why it works: the revised bullet shows frequency, platforms, action, and outcome. Even if your role does not have exact engagement data, you can still add scope and purpose.

Before:

• Managed admin tasks and supported the team.

After for a project administrator role:

• Maintained project trackers, meeting actions, supplier documents, and weekly status updates for a team delivering three concurrent client projects.

After for an HR administrator role:

• Prepared onboarding documents, updated employee records, scheduled interviews, and handled confidential HR inbox queries in line with internal processes.

Why it works: the same background can be shaped toward different roles without inventing anything. Tailoring changes the emphasis.

Before:

• Communication
• Teamwork
• Microsoft Office
• Organisation
• Problem solving

After:

• Excel: VLOOKUP, pivot tables, monthly reporting templates
• Customer support: complaint handling, live chat, email triage
• Administration: diary coordination, inbox management, document control
• CRM: Salesforce case notes, pipeline updates, contact records

Why it works: the revised list names the actual work. It is easier for recruiters and systems to match.