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

I’d say academics loath bullet points - business love them. We have scored people down in exercises for their failure to use bullet points and being overly wordy.

For clarification, my father wasn't in a field where bulletpoints were inadvisable. He couldn't even say what was wrong with them. He would just draw a line in the air while pulling a stupid face and then talk about how brilliant he was. Lucky people who used bulletpoints and therefore never risked working for him. He was hauled before HR a couple of times and as little respect as I have for HR, I appreciate that action was necessary. My point is that you might find the recruitment is being done by a twat on a power trip who's looking for things to discount you because it makes them feel superior. You don't want to work for those people!

I agree. I was taught similarly.

I was quite pleased when I discovered what a functional CV was.

I used to say I was living my life in the wrong order. I didn't go to uni until I was in my 30s, while at uni I did a few courses at the local college as well as they were free and after uni I did an AS level so putting qualifications in chronological or reverse chronological order doesn't make any sense.

I think some teenagers are still being taught this. I was teaching IT to childcare students and they had to write CV for their childcare qualification.

They were listing all their GCSEs with grades even if they F and G grades. I had them putting "5 GCSEs grades A-C including English language and mathematics".

Yes this was a few years ago.

If you are going to work in a nursery the manager doesn't care if you got a grade G in politics GCSE.

I once took the contact email address for a "j-Losbodydouble" made me laugh.

I presume the original Sexy Sue is a lady of a certain age who managed to get in there and bag all of the correctly-spelled email address

True - I'm old, so I still remember an applicant with [email protected]

Someone claiming to have a literature related Masters providing their cv full of spelling and grammar mistakes, and in the interview using phrases like "I seen that the other day". He didn't get the job.

I’m crying 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I was once asked to review some CVs - one had the line "A good poblem solver with a ken eye for detail". I once worked with a guy who briefly had his role on LinkedIn as "Poblem manager" - he fixed the error when I pointed it out. About a week after he fixed the spelling error, I got an email from a recruitment agent looking for a "Poblem manager"; if only my colleague had left his LinkedIn profile alone - the sad thing is I doubt he would have had the field to himself - there'd surely be plenty of other "Poblem Managers" out there looking for an exciting new role.

When I did my CV at finishing my PhD the student support said put everything as bullet points. The academic support said never use bullet points. There are pros and cons of both.

Bullet points make things clearer but generate dead space. Paragraphs fill the space and can be better if you have a lot of information to fit on the two pages. They also demonstrate your written prose better so it depends on whether that is important for the job. Bullet points may be more appropriate earlier in your career

I went with no bullet points. I wouldn't have fitted everything on the 2 pages if I hadn't. I applied for 2 jobs didn't get past HR for the first one as I was unable to move to the US for 3 months within the month - something which wasn't in the advert. I have been in the second job for 2 years

There are also different styles of CV. I helped my sister with a skills based one when she was starting her career as she was young and had ill health so the chronological narrative of the standard CV looked disjointed.

I presume the original Sexy Sue is a lady of a certain age who managed to get in there and bag all of the correctly-spelled email address variants early on, long before all the pathetic young pretenders to her infamy were even born.

She's happily retired now and lives a very comfortable, privileged life in a manor house with land (room for a pony) in Somerset, hence you won't receive her CV anymore, now she's safely graduated from the cut-throat world of paid employment!

Successful rehab doesn't involve much gravedigging.

I have a fine eye for derail.

No. This was my father talking, 30 years ago, and if he were alive now he still wouldn't know what he was talking about. He was just getting off on having the power to choose who to interview.

By huge no-nos, I was thinking of things like bikini photos and middle aged people talking about playing the recorder in primary school.

In a previous role I used to help school leavers apply for training or work. The sheer amount of rude/ offensive email addresses was staggering, I always advised them to set up a serious one . Also one lad got through the telephone, 1st and 2nd interviews and the company had called him to offer a position but his phone went to voicemail and his outgoing message was an expletive riddled homophobic rant, so they decided not to offer. He was most put out when he asked for feedback as, in his words he was " just pissing about " 🙄

Exam results (including all subjects and grades)

Recruiting for a senior position recently. Most applicants just stated their undergraduate degree and any post grad qualifications. But we had one who listed his A levels grades too - and they were very mediocre even allowing for grade inflation since he took them more 30 years ago. Put me off. We did interview because his experience seemed a perfect fit, but I should have gone with my first reaction. He didn’t get the job. There may be reasons why your school grades were poor but not a reflection of subsequent achievement/ ability, even if just immaturity. But 35 years later applying for a senior role, unless explicitly asked, miss them off.

I've mentioned this on her before. I once received a cv from a male candidate who described his previous role as "performing manly administrative tasks." I think he was missing an "i"!

Can someone please tell us the big no nos. I've got bullet points! Is that a big fat mistake?

The truth is, there's a lot of subjectivity involved, even when you've tailored the CV to the job and all the rest of it. An older person who has an officially "outdated" approach might be reading, or a person who gets a power trip off it and is looking for anything to criticise (we've had one on here and my father was one too; he used to sneer at bulletpoints). Some CVs are obviously egregiously badly done and there are a few huge no-nos but in a world where someone got the job after accidentally submitting a joke CV claiming that she shot a man in Reno just to watch him die... Imagine if the reader wasn't a Johnny Cash fan!

The number of times I've told students' to use their college or school email not their personal one and they say, "But I never check that".

Well set up to make the school email forward it to sexxy_sue... why is it always 'sexy' with two 'x'es?

Oh, also: We weren't taught that we had to tailor it for each job in those days. A CV was simply a factual document of what you'd done and when (literally "the course of life") and the only time you updated it was if you changed job, so we had one CV and sent it out unedited for every application.

The cover letter was the place where we "sold" ourselves, and told the recruiter why we believed we were suitable for the job, but even that had to follow a very strict format, such as:

• I am writing to apply for the position of (whatever), as seen in (where you saw the ad, you had to include this for some reason)
• a paragraph about how keen we were and why we believed we'd be suitable for the job
• a closing paragraph saying you'd be available for an interview at their convenience and could supply references on request

It was all very formulaic.

@SeanBeansMealDeal

Yes, I think this is a very good point.

For most people, you learn how to write a CV towards the end of your education and then you never really re-evaluate the whole process again; when you update your CV, you base it on what you personally know a CV to be.

Exactly this.

Part of this may be that when applying for jobs as a school leaver you don't have any work experience to speak of to put on a CV so the "hobbies" section is there purely to flesh it out and give it some content, but I remember clearly once my experience started to build wondering how on earth I was meant to keep everything to two pages and also still include all the sections I had been taught to include; I didn't know I was allowed to leave it off to make room for more relevant content.

When I learned to do a CV in the mid 80s, we were taught to include the following, in this order:

Personal details (name, address, telephone number, date of birth, marital status)
Work experience in reverse date order: where you worked and your duties (not listing achievements as is done these days!)
Exam results (including all subjects and grades)
Hobbies and interests
The names and contact details of two referees

Things have changed since then, but there are undoubtedly people of my age still using this format and not knowing it's "wrong", and if you don't know you're doing it wrong, you don't research how to do it correctly.

the range of CV content that impresses any potential recruiters can be as broad as the number of recruiters themselves.
This is true. Everyone I show my CV to says it is shite. So I make changes they suggest, show to next "expert" who says "that's shite".

I didn't instantly spot that you were pointing out the wrong usage for 'principal' and assumed you were referring to a role for a 'character' to run a sleazy, grubby 'adult' establishment

Yes, I think this is a very good point.

For most people, you learn how to write a CV towards the end of your education and then you never really re-evaluate the whole process again; when you update your CV, you base it on what you personally know a CV to be.

Even if you did think to check for any subtle changes that might have arisen in 'standard' CVs since you learned, you still have no way of knowing the age, personality or preferences of the person/people who will review it.

You may include your hobbies and find that the person who reads it thinks "This is very poor - surely they know that your hobbies are completely irrelevant? Why should I care about that? I want somebody who will set their mind to the important task at hand." Or you may not include your hobbies and find that the person who reads it thinks "This sounds like a dull person - I'm glad they seem to have a good work ethic, but they haven't mentioned a single thing about their interests outside of work to balance it out; I don't want to be stuck working for 8 hours every day with a boring person with nothing about them and no interests to chat about."

I think the problem is that, whilst you can take as much advice on a good CV as you can find - and I think we'd all agree that it's best not to mention being on Jeremy Kyle or your love of swinging - the range of CV content that impresses any potential recruiters can be as broad as the number of recruiters themselves.

Your quirky mould-breaking 'stand-out' submission may really catch their eye and impress them with your originality, your individuality and the fact that you don't blindly follow the crowd; or they may see it as an embarrassing gimmick from an irritating attention-seeker who doesn't understand the first thing about what a CV 'should' be and bin it instantly.

I have actually seen that recently in a job advert for ‘Principle ‘ of xxxx Academy !