No matter how many jobs you apply for you are just not getting contacted for an interview – sound familiar? Well don’t panic as we are here to help you get to the root of the problem and fix your CV as quickly as possible.
These are our top 3 reasons why your CV may be preventing you from getting an interview…
Spelling and grammatical errors
This is one of the most common mistakes we still come across on a daily basis, and one of the reasons why is down to how much we all rely on the spell checker. If you rely solely on the spell checker you are making a big mistake as it can often either not pick up on a spelling or grammatical error, or it can also change a correct sentence or word and create an error that wasn’t there before.
Using the spell checker is not a bad idea is it works for the most part, but you have to be very careful to make sure you double check exactly what it’s suggesting to change. Words like ‘their’ and ‘there’ as well as ‘it’s’ and ‘its’ can often get changed when they are fine as they were.
Your CV always needs to be proofread by your own eye, and we also highly recommend having it checked by a professional, manager, hiring manager etc.
Your work history is not relevant
The most common way to create the ‘work history/experience’ section of a CV is to simply list all of the past roles along with the tasks and responsibilities for each role. Unfortunately this is overkill and not of any interest to the hiring manager – so what is?
The hiring manager only wants to see if you have any experience that relates to their company and the position on offer. The key to success is to highlight and focus upon the relevant tasks and responsibilities that closely match the job advert. This will allow you to showcase the right skills and experience, and put the rest of your history into the background.
You don’t want to remove anything entirely as a gap in your CV is a very bad idea, and instead you want to provide more details on the relevant roles and give very little information about the others. All you need to do for some of the roles is just list the timeline and job title, and at the most state a couple of the tasks which quickly sum up what you did.
This frees up more of the page for you to go into better detail for the more important roles and makes the hiring managers job far easier. Remember – the hiring manager will only spend around 30 seconds on average reading each CV, so you need to make those 30 seconds count!
Use keywords from the job advert
This is probably one of the smartest things you can do when creating a CV, and it’s important to remember that you should always write your CV specifically for each role using these keywords every time.
Grab a pen and paper and read through the job advert, then write down a keyword or sentence that you feel is really important. Once you have this list you can then go back over your CV to ensure you use them somewhere within. It could be in your cover letter, work history, or even the skills section.
