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

[Kidulthood2027]

Have just realised I've been sending off a CV with a sentence that reads "I undertook regular security checks of the hotel during evening shits." I had meant to say "shifts". I thought I had proofread the CV thoroughly before sending it off, but clearly not enough. I was wondering why I was receiving so little interest for basic retail/food service jobs. Absolutely mortified. Any stories to make me feel better? Can be from you or from CVs you have reviewed during your working life.

And saying you were head girl after a 20-year career is a bit embarrassing too.

What if it wasn't a mistake though. I'm sure there are people (men), who do enjoy banging one out in their garden 😂

I spent time meticulously proofreading the main body of my CV before distributing it far and wide to try to find work. Only after several months of determined job hunting did I realise the error in my personal details. I had missed the 'o' out of 'county' in my address 😳

At a meeting of a society I belonged to, the Chairman was introducing the guest speaker. He had evidently asked her to provide her qualifications, achievements etc, to ensure he introduced her correctly. She had printed off what must have been her profile on her work intranet or similar, and he just read it all out word for word. So we didn't just hear about her research interests, publications and so on, but the fact that she was responsible for room allocations at her institution, and similar internal admin roles.

If I was concerned with decompressing and dealing with stress I'd ask them the question at the interview. Unless it was part of your job description that you had to have a hobby - rejecting them on that basis lacks process.

Haha! I have boasted about my pubic sector experience before.

Well, that's better than 2 speaker introductions at meetings that I attended.

In one case, the person, who was supposed to be the speaker's main contact and to be looking after her on her work visit to the UK, was clearly not doing his job -as we already knew! He introduced her: 'This is Dr X (completely spoonerizing the name); and she's going to speak about (looked down at the seminar list, and read out the title of her talk) and, er, that is what she's going to talk about'. That was the entire introduction!

The other was worse. The speaker had worked in a number of biology-related areas, ranging from the study of certain animal species to human children. The person introducing him said, 'X used to fiddle about with (a small animal species) but now he fiddles about with little kids!'

Once got a cover letter written in green ink assuring me that the allegations that he was an IRA member were completely false.

On a project I was managing we had some teenagers looking for work and I was looking at one of their CVs because she hadn't had any luck with applications. It became clear why not when I saw her email address. For example [email protected].

Apparently her friend had set it up for her as a joke.

This reminds me of a guy I used to know he used to attend those jobs entre CV workshops because he did t WA t to work and didn't intend too. He'd created a CV under their supervision but then signed into a neighbours computer after scrounging off them constantly. He'd left himself signed in a d left this CV in his email. They downloaded it and doctored it, changing literally everything so where it said "I'm hard working and always on time". It had been changed to "I can be quite lazy and don't really intend d to work, I often arrive late and will expect to be paid for work not done" etc. They literally changed his whole CV like this. Still maintaining the format. He was so oblivious he kept sending it out for nearly a year until Job seekers allowance were sent a copy by a prospective employer. He argued the fact he'd sent it then sent a copy from his email to his job seeker coach of the original (the doctored version) not. Checking it saying "This is the CV I sent" he was sanctioned and only realised when they literally read it ot out to him and suggested he took a proper look at it. Still doesn't know to this day how it happened yet the whole village did before him. He did eventually get a job at Macdonald's cleaning but lasted about a week. Now his wife keeps him.

Happened to my DH just this week (he was the employer, not the interviewee). During interview: 'So, tell us why you are interested in this position?'
Candidate: "Well, I've always wanted to work for BigTruck, your company is just so fascinating, I have read all about your values and plans for the future etc etc"

Great speech, done his research. Only problem was that the interviewing company was not BigTruck. BigTruck is the competitor next door.

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.

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.

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.

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

AI can read PDFs.

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.

Eye have a spelling chequer! It seas miss takes.

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.

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.

😂

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?

Do you work for Kraft?

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.

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.