13 CV Mistakes That Cost People Interviews

Most CV mistake lists are about typos and Comic Sans. Those are real but rare. These are the ones that show up constantly in CVs written by capable people who are getting fewer interviews than they should.

Roughly in order of how much damage they do.

1. Listing duties instead of achievements

The most common and most expensive mistake.

"Responsible for managing the team's reporting process" describes a job description. Every person who has held that title could write the identical line. It gives a reader no way to distinguish you.

Duty: "Responsible for the monthly reporting process."

Achievement: "Cut monthly reporting from four days to six hours by replacing the manual spreadsheet consolidation with a scheduled SQL job — freeing roughly three days a month across two analysts."

Same task. One is a role, the other is an argument for hiring you.

Fix: for each bullet, ask "so what changed because I did this?" If there is no answer, either find the outcome or cut the bullet.

2. A two-column layout

Beautiful on screen, frequently destroyed by the applicant tracking system that reads it before a human does. Parsers commonly read straight across the page, interleaving your sidebar into your job history and producing text that makes no sense — so your roles never get classified as roles.

You never learn this happened. Details in what ATS-friendly actually means.

Fix: one column. You can still use colour and good typography.

3. A CV exported as an image

Designed in a graphics tool and exported so the whole page is a picture. It looks flawless and contains zero extractable text, so the parser receives an empty document.

Fix: copy your PDF's text and paste it into a plain text editor. If nothing pastes, this is you.

4. A summary that could describe anyone

"Hardworking, detail-oriented professional with a passion for excellence seeking a challenging opportunity in a dynamic organisation."

Every word is unfalsifiable. Nobody writes "careless professional with a passion for mediocrity", which is precisely why claiming the opposite carries no information.

Fix: name your field, your years, your specialism, and one concrete result. If the summary could belong to someone in a different industry, it is not a summary.

5. The same CV for every application

Not tailoring at all is a mistake; rewriting from scratch each time is a waste. The efficient version is tailoring the top third.

Fix: read the posting, note the three or four things it actually asks for, and make sure those appear in your summary and top bullets in the posting's own words. "Stakeholder management" and "client liaison" may mean the same thing to you and not to a keyword search.

6. Skills rating bars

A five-star rating on "Python" communicates nothing consistent — your four is someone else's two — and if the bars are graphics, they are invisible to a parser. They also spend a lot of page space on very little information.

Fix: grouped lists. "Confident: Python, SQL, Go. Familiar: Docker, Terraform."

7. Contact details in the page header

Tidy, and often skipped entirely: many parsers treat headers and footers as boilerplate and discard them. Your phone number never reaches the database.

Fix: contact details in the document body, at the top.

8. Unexplained gaps

A silent two-year hole invites worse assumptions than almost any true explanation. Career breaks are extremely common and nobody serious penalises them.

Fix: one line. "Career break — caregiving, 2023–2024." Done, and move on.

9. Going back twenty years

Your 2004 role is diluting your 2024 one. Space spent on ancient history is space not spent on what you did recently.

Fix: detail the last ten to fifteen years. Older roles get one line each, or a single "Earlier career: [titles], 2002–2010" line, or nothing.

10. Claims you cannot discuss

Everything on the page is a question you have agreed to answer. Listing a technology you touched once, or a metric you cannot explain the derivation of, is a trap you set for yourself. The interviewer's follow-up is always "tell me more about that".

Fix: read every line and ask whether you could talk about it for ninety seconds under mild pressure. If not, remove it or learn it properly.

11. Invented numbers

Related but worse. "Increased revenue by 40%" is powerful when true and collapses instantly when the follow-up is "over what period, and how was it measured?"

Fix: if you do not have a number, describe scope instead — "across three regional teams", "for a catalogue of ~40,000 items". Specific and true beats impressive and fabricated.

12. Three pages

Recruiters spend seconds on a first pass. A third page does not add information; it moves your best material further from where anyone will look.

Fix: one page under about five years' experience, two beyond. If you are over, compress old roles rather than shrinking the font to 8pt — dense unreadable text is worse than a page break.

13. cv_final_v3_ACTUAL.pdf

A small thing that is entirely free to fix, and it sits in a recruiter's downloads folder among two hundred others.

Fix: Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf.

The mistake that is not on this list

Formatting, tailoring, and honest numbers get you read and get you called. Then the document stops mattering, because you have to say all of it out loud to someone who interrupts.

Almost nobody practises that transition. The bullets on a CV are compressed — "led a migration that cut latency 40%" is eight words standing in for four months — and unpacking one back into a fluent two-minute answer is a genuinely different skill from writing it. People who write excellent CVs routinely discover this in the room, which is the worst place to discover it.

Fix the thirteen above, then go and be bad at explaining your own CV somewhere that does not cost you the job.