To ask for the worst CV's you've ever seen?!

[Isitgiroday]

About to pimp my CV prior to a career change after almost a decade in the same industry - looking for tips and hints of what to avoid!

Hobbies- Don't include hydroponics and making home brew!

If you are required to bring ID for the interview, make sure your bag of drugs isn't tucked inside your passport!

Ooh I win I win!

• a photo (would be bad enough)
• of THREE MEN (which even are you)
• in BOW TIES looking as upper class rich boy club as you like.

It was also decorated with an orange border and instead of organising it by work experience, he’d labelled it by his life’s journey with how he’d personally grown and developed over time, ending in a round the world trip.

The most ridiculous part? I would have thrown it in the bin but my boss convinced me to interview him as once we read between the lines he did actually have the right experience. I was expecting him to be a complete arsehole but actually he was perfectly friendly and we gave him the job!

But yeah, worst CV ever.

I used to work placing graduates with internships. I’ve seen some real shockers. The ones that always made me laugh were when they were written in the style of an apprentice reject. ‘I’ve got a great head for business’ and ‘I’m really good at business’ type vague boasts, when they’d never had a job before. One guy started his cv by saying ‘I won’t accept less than £40k because I’ve got a degree’. He had a 3rd from a not great university. I had to break it to him that having a degree doesn’t guarantee a high starting salary and I had been working for 20 years and still hadn’t earned that. (Albeit not in bizznizz).

Another girl wrote a whole page about how much she loved her grandparents, to show how caring she was. It’s really hard at the beginning when you don’t have any experience, but tedious, irrelevant waffle is a real no no.

Sometimes CVs should be several pages long. My academic vitae is around 12 pages, so check out what others are like in the industry you’re applying within.

Worst CV I have received was someone who under key competencies wrote making good coffee and tea, and that she was pretty. I suspect she assumed I’d be a man.

Make sure the information you give, especially if it is for some significant piece of work, is accurate, true and can be verified.
A colleague was once working at a major bank (as a freelancer) and his boss received a cv from someone with whom this colleague had worked on a previous project.
The cv stated that the candidate had been responsible for xyz which had achieved 3 million in savings to the company. After being asked to review the cv, my colleague said: "Well, the candidate did work on this project, but made several serious errors, which actually cost 3 million and was let go."
Needless to say that the application did not progress.

Oh god I’ve just remembered, one guy included a map of the Tokyo tube network and explained he’d been able to navigate it with ease to demonstrate his skills in problem solving.

I’ve done some recruiting recently.
Clear format, simple font and attention to the spacing and formatting makes a good impression.
Remove any acronyms or terms specific to your current role/business if they are not industry specific. Often see CVs saying things like ‘responsible for GNBT processing’ and I’ve no idea what that means.
Not bothered about personal interest sections, unless it’s something significant. The fact you might like swimming is sort of irrelevant.
Don’t include personal info about your kids or family including in the interview. I don’t need to know. If you’ve had a career break, just put career break for caring responsibilities and that is sufficient.
I quite like a cover letter. It shows effort and can give me insight into why the applicant has applied which is helpful to know.

My Mum was a recruitment consultant back in the 70s and 80s and she told me how someone applied for a job in a hospital, he said he’d be good at it because he knew a lot about drugs.

make sure your email address is something suitable to put on a cv! You would not believe some of the email address I have seen printed on CVs

@Sparklesocks

The jobcentre used to tell people to do this, they said employers loved it!

"- cut out unnecessary job history- the amount of people who still had their part time school job was insane"

OK, for school jobs, but if you cut out all your temp jobs you run into the 'account for any gaps' problem. I now have something like 'temporary employment, details available on request' just to show I wasn't in prison on unemployed the whole time.

Try not to forget to attach the CV to your email

that's always helpful

I saw recently a CV shared on Twitter when the applicant had sent his cv to be checked by a friend who’d confirmed it was fine and was promptly sent onto the recruiter.

Anyway what the applicant hadn’t noticed is his ‘friend’ has added fingering slags under the hobbies and interests section 😂. The recruiter emailed the applicant back and suggested he remove this part. The applicant was of course mortified! How embarrassing

Bad things I've seen that put me right off a candidate:

CVs that are too long. I've had over 50 applications for some positions in the past. I don't have time to read a novella for each candidate so if they can't communicate to me in a couple of pages max why they might be worth interviewing they are straight in the bin.

Photos - just no. They may be the done thing in some parts of the world but in the UK they are pure cringe. On top of that, they create issues when we are not meant to allow factors such as age or ethnicity to influence our decisions.

Keep it simple and professional when it comes to formatting. If you think half a dozen different fonts will make you stand out, you are quite correct - it will make you stand out as a twit.

Excessive use of highly subjective corporate bullshit like "Self-motivated", "team-player", "able to work with minimal supervision" etc and ffs do not every proclaim yourself to be a "thought leader".

CVs that don't tell a clear and logical story. First off, I want to see how many of the essential and preferred skills I've listed in the job spec you claim to have. Then I want to be able to confirm from your work experience and qualifications that it's reasonable to believe you do actually have those skills. Make it easy for me and don't insult my intelligence with blatantly obvious fantasy and exaggeration.

Hobbies - I do not care what you do in your private life. If you have something genuinely interesting and relevant to the job then we might talk about it for a minute at interview but keep it off your CV. The exception might be if you are a recent school leaver / graduate who doesn't have much else to leverage but stick to things that are in some way relevant to the job.

@MrsKoala

Oh god I’ve just remembered, one guy included a map of the Tokyo tube network and explained he’d been able to navigate it with ease to demonstrate his skills in problem solving.

Oh i quite like that! (If a 'please demonstrate your skills at problem solving question had been asked'.)

In one job application I did they asked some specific niche questions. I googled the first one and discovered the entire lot had been taken verbatim from university exam sample questions online.

It was quite easy tailoring my response from the sample answers.

3 years at that job in the end.

I've had two pages "stapled" together with a large safety pin....

"When you've been doing a similar role for the past decade, I don't particularly care that you enjoy eating out and reading detective fiction."

No, but if the interviewer also likes detective fiction it can be a conversation starter. And, as I mentioned hobbies, and activities outside of work can show different skills and qualities.

I'd say make it 2 pages MAX. Don't list interests...no one cares. I personally would never give that little resume thing that some peeps do at the top.e.g: A committed, focussed individual with a proven track record...etc, etc.

Help anyone - got 7 rejections so far jobs - admin/clerical in NHS - getting disheartened!
4 interviews - no success - is it my age I am 52 female with no previous medical experience but over 3o years secretarial/admin for private firms ie Solicitors/Accountants - but want to work within NHS - help!

"I don't recruit anymore, but photos are generally quite useful if the person is going to be client-facing. "

I hope you weren't choosing people based on what they look like.

I agree so much, the hyperboles to describe unemployment (as above, CEO of the home kind, so cringe)

or to boost a bog standard basic job (well done on working for McDo, but no need to ramble on because you sold French fries)

are not helping. They really are not.

If you're submitting a hard copy of your application, a light-brown ring on the front page of the document where a coffee cup has been put will result in the applicant not even being considered: the CV will go straight in the bin. Likewise a soggy cornflake - and I've seen both.

Simple spelling mistakes imply illiteracy and/or carelessness, to say nothing of the self-evident inability to use a spelling-checker. Remember though that some of the more obscure punctuation errors might not be highlighted by your spelling checker - so get the whole thing proof-read at least once, and preferably twice. It might not be the done thing to criticise people openly for making grammatical errors these days, but that doesn't mean they aren't noticed - and when somebody has a limited amount of time to compile a shortlist of candidates for interview from a large pool of applicants, such errors can finish you.

As other posters have indicated, no more than two sides of A4. If there are a lot of applications, the shorter ones are likely to be read first. No fancy fonts, please.

If we're talking about a professional role, having an up-to-date entry on LinkedIn would be a good idea (in which case provide a link to it on your CV) - but if you do that, make sure what you tell them in your application tallies with it. If you've got your own website, provide a link to it - but only if the content is business-related. If you've got a Facebook page that's publicly accessible then they'll probably visit it, so make sure it doesn't contain anything at all that you wouldn't want them to see - especially not any derogatory remarks about your present employer.

Make sure you can satisfactorily explain any gaps in your career. This one really matters, because they'll be wary of applicants who have just served prison terms that they don't want to talk about.

If the interview is going to be held remotely because of COVID (e.g. via Skype or MS Teams), be prepared to be seen on camera. We had half a dozen candidates to interview recently that way: we didn't ask to see them visually because we felt it might be regarded as intrusive, given that they were probably calling in from their homes, but one volunteered. Her personality and confidence just shone through: she got the job.

Hope this helps

@ItsA1WayStreet

I try to remember that usually, a CV has only one very specific objective - to get you an interview. So I try to keep mine brief - profile, skills, experience

It might also be used AT the interview itself - recruiters may use it to direct their questions.

I did a lot of recruitment for entry level jobs in financial services admin before I had kids (a long, long time ago). One of my memorable CVs had a para under interests about being the fastest Brownie in Peckham when she was 10yo.

More recently, a CV which wasn’t bad, but accompanied by a handwritten letter on paper that had been torn out of a spiral bound notebook. Hadn’t even bothered to trim it.

First of all, recruiters are mainly modern folks. Resources don't read your email from top to bottom, they use softwares to scroll through the hundreds we get.

think KEY WORDS to ensure your CV is picked up!

Then be consistent, justify WHY you should be considered for the job, not by rambling on for 10 pages, but with a couple of concise sentences in your job history showing you can actually DO the job you are applying for.