Vague Bullet Points That Describe Duties, Not Results
The single most common CV mistake is writing bullet points that read like a job description: "Responsible for managing social media accounts" or "Handled customer enquiries." These tell a recruiter what your job theoretically involved, but nothing about whether you were any good at it. Everyone who held your title could write the same line, so it does nothing to set you apart.
Fix it by leading with a result and showing scope. Instead of "Responsible for managing social media accounts," write "Grew Instagram following from 4,000 to 22,000 in 11 months by shifting to short-form video." Even when you don't have a clean number, you can show impact: "Rebuilt the onboarding email sequence, cutting first-week support tickets noticeably." The structure to aim for is action verb + what you did + the outcome.
Typos, Grammar Errors, and Inconsistent Tenses
Spelling and grammar mistakes signal carelessness, and for many recruiters a single glaring typo is enough to bin an application, especially for roles where attention to detail matters. The irony is that these are the easiest mistakes to eliminate, which is exactly why they read so badly when they slip through.
Tense inconsistency is a subtler version of the same problem. Use past tense for previous roles and present tense for your current one, and stay consistent throughout. Don't write "Lead a team of five" (it should be "Led") in one bullet and "Managing budgets" in the next. Read your CV aloud, run it through a spellchecker, and then have a second pair of eyes look at it, because your brain auto-corrects your own errors.
Formatting That Breaks Applicant Tracking Systems
Many medium and large employers filter CVs through applicant tracking systems (ATS) before a human ever sees them. Fancy formatting that looks great to you can become unreadable garbage to the parser. The usual culprits are text inside images, multi-column layouts that scramble reading order, tables, text boxes, headers and footers that get ignored, and unusual fonts.
Keep it boring and machine-readable: a single-column layout, standard section headings like "Work Experience" and "Education," a common font, and a .docx or text-based PDF rather than a scanned or image-based file. If you want a designed CV for networking or for sending directly to a human, keep a plain version specifically for online applications. A second related mistake is stuffing keywords invisibly or in white text to game the ATS, which modern systems flag and which a human will spot instantly.
Sending One Generic CV to Every Job
A generic CV is a comfortable mistake because it feels efficient, but it almost always underperforms. When your CV doesn't reflect the language and priorities of the specific job posting, it reads as a near miss even when you are genuinely qualified. Recruiters are scanning for evidence that you match this role, not a vaguely relevant career summary.
You don't need to rewrite everything for each application. Adjust the top third of the CV, which gets the most attention: your professional summary, the order of your bullet points, and which skills you foreground. Mirror the terminology in the job description (if they say "stakeholder management," use that phrase rather than "dealing with people") and move the most relevant experience higher. Twenty minutes of tailoring per application beats firing off fifty identical copies.
Irrelevant Content and the Wrong Length
Padding your CV with everything you've ever done dilutes the things that matter. Common offenders include a decades-old Saturday job that has nothing to do with your current field, a hobbies section listing "socialising and watching films," outdated technical skills, and a paragraph-long mission statement at the top that says nothing concrete. Each irrelevant line pushes your strongest material further down the page.
Length is part of the same problem. For most people, two pages is the sweet spot; early-career candidates can often do it in one, and only senior or highly technical profiles justify going longer. If you're spilling onto a third page, that's usually a sign you're including detail nobody asked for. Cut anything that doesn't help you get this job, and give the space you save to your achievements.
Missing Numbers, Dates, and Context
CVs that float free of any concrete detail are hard to trust and easy to skip. If you never quantify anything, the reader has no way to gauge the scale of what you did: managing a team of 3 is very different from managing 30, and a campaign that reached hundreds is different from one that reached millions. Numbers don't have to be revenue figures; team sizes, volumes, timeframes, and percentages all add credibility.
Unexplained employment gaps and missing dates create the same friction. You don't owe anyone your life story, but leaving dates off entirely looks like you're hiding something, and recruiters notice. A brief, honest line for a meaningful gap ("Career break for caregiving, 2024") is far better than a confusing timeline. Clarity reassures; mystery invites the assumption you'd least want.
Skipping the Final Review Before You Apply
The last mistake is treating "send" as the finish line. After you've written and tailored your CV, it deserves a genuine review pass focused on the things hiring managers actually react to: Does every bullet show impact? Is the formatting clean and ATS-safe? Have you matched the job description? Are there any errors? Reading it cold the next morning, rather than the moment you finish, surfaces problems you'll otherwise miss.
If you don't have a brutally honest friend in the industry, this is where an objective second opinion helps. A tool like CVRoast points out the weak, vague, and self-sabotaging lines on your CV and suggests sharper rewrites, which is useful precisely because it has no incentive to be polite about your favourite phrasing. Whether you use a person or a tool, the principle is the same: never send the first draft, and never send a CV you haven't read as if you were the one deciding whether to interview yourself.