Here's the uncomfortable truth about your CV: it usually gets less than ten seconds on the first pass. And increasingly, the first "reader" isn't a person at all. It's an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that scans, scores and filters your CV before a human ever sees it.
That means a strong candidate can be rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability. The good news? Every one of these mistakes is fixable in an afternoon. Read on and keep a tally.
1. Your CV opens with a fill-in-the-blank objective
You know the line: "Seeking a challenging position where I can utilise my skills and grow with a dynamic organisation." Everyone writes it, which is exactly why it says nothing. Worse, it wastes the most valuable space on the whole document: the top third, the first thing anyone reads.
The fix: replace it with a two-to-three line professional summary that names your role, your experience and one concrete result. Compare these:
Before: Hardworking individual seeking a role to apply my skills.
After: Sales professional with 6 years in FMCG. Grew regional sales 34% in a year by rebuilding a lapsed dealer network.
The second one earns you the next ten seconds. The first one gets you binned.
2. The design that looks great to you is invisible to the machine
Tables, text boxes, two-column layouts, logos, a photo, details tucked into the header or footer: these can look polished on your screen and arrive as scrambled nonsense inside an ATS. If the system can't read your experience, it can't score you, and you disappear.
The fix: keep it simple and single-column. Use standard section headings the software recognises (Experience, Education, Skills), a common font, and no photo. Save it in the format the employer asks for (usually a Word document or a text-based PDF, not an image).
3. You listed your duties, not your achievements
"Responsible for managing the sales team." So was everyone else who held that job. A list of responsibilities tells a recruiter what your role was; it doesn't tell them how well you did it, which is the only thing they actually want to know.
The fix: lead with results, and put a number on them wherever you can. A simple formula: strong verb + what you did + measurable result.
Before: Responsible for social media.
After: Grew the company's Instagram following from 800 to 12,000 in eight months, driving a 20% rise in enquiries.
Numbers make you specific, and specific makes you believable.
4. Your CV doesn't speak the job ad's language
Both the ATS and the recruiter are scanning for the exact terms in the job description. If the advert asks for "stakeholder management" and you wrote "dealing with clients," you may quietly fail to match, even though you can do the job.
The fix: read the specific advert closely and mirror its key phrases, honestly, especially the hard skills and tools it names. If it says "Excel, reconciliations and month-end reporting," and you've done all three, use those words. Don't keyword-stuff. Just make sure the language on your CV lines up with the language of the role.
5. You send the same CV to every job
One generic CV cannot be genuinely relevant to ten different roles. When you fire the same document at everything, you're relying on the reader to work out why you fit, and they won't do that work for you.
The fix: keep one master CV, then tailor three things for each application: the summary at the top, your top skills, and the order of your achievements so the most relevant sit first. Fifteen focused minutes per application beats fifty scattergun ones every time.
6. Small errors are quietly binning you
A recruiter can't verify your talent from a page, so they use tiny signals as shortcuts, and errors read as carelessness. The usual culprits: an unprofessional email address (partyanimal263@…), a phone number that no longer works, a typo in the very first line, inconsistent date formats, or "referees available on request" eating up space it doesn't earn.
The fix: use a plain, name-based email address, double-check your contact details actually work, keep your formatting consistent, and proofread by reading the whole thing aloud, or hand it to a second pair of eyes. You'll catch things your own eye skates over.
7. It's too long, and it buries the good stuff
Three pages listing every job since 2009, in dense walls of text, is a gift no recruiter has time to unwrap. Remember: seconds on the first pass. If your best achievement is on page three, it may as well not exist.
The fix: aim for one to two pages. Put your most relevant and most recent experience first. Trim older or unrelated roles to a single line. Use short bullet points and generous white space so the page can be scanned, not laboured through.
So, how many did you count?
If you spotted three or four of these on your own CV, don't panic. That's normal, and it's genuinely good news: it means the reason you've been getting silence isn't your ability. It's a handful of things you can fix this week.
Start with the two that cost the most: rewrite your opening summary (mistake #1) and turn three duties into achievements with numbers (#3). Then strip your layout back so the ATS can actually read it (#2). Those three alone will move you ahead of most of the pile.
Not sure whether an ATS can even read your CV? Run it through a free check with CV263. It flags the formatting and keyword issues that get CVs filtered out, and helps you build a clean, ATS-ready CV in minutes.