To ask for the biggest CV fails you've come across?

That just shows you have good social skills 😂

Unprofessional

Another tip - use read-aloud software if you have it!

My favourites were

• A guy who (intentionally) put his girlfriend's phone number on his CV with the explanation that she was the organised one and he probably wouldn't even answer if we rang him
• Someone who included their prison jobs on their CV... the pattern of their employment history was "lost job due to fight with employer" alternating with "prison sentence for assaulting former employer"
• Another guy who listed his hobbies as (and this is a direct quote, it's burned in my brain) "home projects, by home projects what i mean is motorbikes"

If you said you were contentious on your own cv the mistake would be obvious but on a reference it’s not so clear because it’s not an impossible thing for a referee to say.

I've no idea if it is standard, though they'd presumably take up references before making a job offer, but sadly nobody did realise the mistake..

I was helping a group with their CV’s. When writing a bit about themselves one woman wrote that she made a lovely Victoria sponge.

The dangers of autocorrect and predictive text. You absolutely MUST proof read at least three times, and then give it to someone else to proof read, because your brain tends to anticipate seeing the word you meant to type, rather than seeing the word you actually typed.

Assuming the rest of the reference was positive, I'm surprised nobody realised it was a mistake. Is it standard in teaching to send full references before getting an interview or job offer?

One excellent newly graduated teaching trainee that we knew was not able to get interviews, though she had a good degree and her lecturers loved her. Nobody could understand what was was going wrong.
Eventually she managed to get sight of one of the references that had been sent to all potential employers. Instead of saying that she was "conscientious" it said that she was "contentious", hardly a recommendation!

Not on a CV but did type in a letter once that the person should be referred to a prostitute specialist and not prostate specialist. Thankfully picked up and corrected before the letter was sent.

I've been applying for a few jobs recently and have only just found out PDFs are not wanted and in fact they all want word doc CVs so I've been falling at the first hurdle.
Following application instructions is basic but surprisingly few make it through that simple sift.
If there was no instruction to submit a doc in Word format - that’s the recruiter’s failure - and they will have unfortunately discarded a number of good candidates I’d gently challenge them on it.
PDF is considered the best format for circulating docs - leaving it in Word can cause lots of formatting issues making your CV hard to read and looking scruffy.

I have suggested the free version of Grammarly (much better than spell check) to candidates who have submitted CVs with upwards of 40 typos - a bit of self awareness and plugging your own skills gaps is helpful. And even when they replied to say thank you their emails contained at least one or two - I’m not even that picky.

Do you work for Kraft?

Why is that I wonder? Means you definitely have to re-save every version without any tracking or else they can simply unwind any changes, surely?

😂

Apparently this was supposed to be funny. When doing my CV at university I’d evidently left the file open and the computer unsupervised as sent it out with the addition of ‘on and on and on’ (by my ‘hilarious’ boyfriend) after listing my hobbies as reading, drawing, painting and rambling.

While reading CVs at my work, I came across a young fellow that had put night stalker for previous experience. I explained that he should change it to night stocker. He was appreciative that I took the time to show him the correction needed.

Eye have a spelling chequer! It seas miss takes.

It does help to get someone else to read your CV for accuracy, or leave it for a day or two, so you read what you've actually written, not what you think you've written. And the computer spell-checker is a useful resource for picking up spellings.

AI can read PDFs.

we had a CV written in pencil on the cardboard sleeve of a dairylea dunkers multipack.

Along those lines, I had one from someone who also wanted to highlight his great customer service and how much he enjoyed working with the public. So much so, he wrote that he was very much ‘a voyeur of people’. As he was internal, I did him a favour by going off to find him and clarifying whether he did mean that and, if so, whether he really wanted to admit it on his CV.

This is one big difference from the US to the UK. In the US the CV is the curriculum vitae, compendium of all related education and experience. It is long and involved. Usually used by academics in applying for faculty positions. It's what is considered a resume in the UK. In the US the resume is supposed to be short and concise.
In my position as student advisor it was the hardest things I had to do to get students to understand the difference.
Harder to get students to understand it wasn't an exercise in creative writing.

I once received a CV from an overweight older guy who had allegedly worked in private security services. He had a picture of himself in shades and a tuxedo, rolling over the bonnet of a big flash car. It was hilarious. He didn’t get an interview. The vacancy was for a sales role, but if I’d been looking for James Bond’s grandad he might have been in with a shout.