6 Red flags that lead the employer to reject your CV straight away.

Have you ever wondered that even after applying for hundreds of jobs why you get a response for very few applications? Why some people get success in just a few weeks whereas some take even more than 8-10 months to get success.

Einstein has famously said, “Insanity is about doing the same things again & again and expecting a different result”. Let’s check out what are the major red flags that lead to a CV rejection.

1. Lousy Career Summary:

A career summary is more about your personal branding rather than just a few lines describing your past experiences. Ensure that your career summary mentions the below 6 essential things. Missing any one of them may not answer a recruiter’s questions and can turn your CV into a pile of rejected or ignored CVs

1.1 Who you are?

1.2 What are you selling?

1.3 How do you distinguish from the crowd?

1.4 What benefit you could bring to the employer?

1.5 How do you match the duties mentioned in job specifications?

1.6 How do you bring credibility to your claims?

2. Trite or Convoluted writing style

This error is most common for non-native English speakers. Some people have a very unimpressive and unoriginal writing style with lots of overused clichés, dull phrases, and an insipid description of job duties. They most often confuse between what is “adequate”. Either they provide irrelevant information that confuses the reader, or they use brevity so much that they compromise on quality. This kind of error can be an immediate turn off for a reader and can lead to a quick rejection.

3. CV embellishments

This is one of the most common reasons for rejections. Some job seekers pose each and every detail of their accomplishments and results achieved in such a way that is hard to be believed as true. The common areas of embellishment happen in showing experience in leading a team, revenue generation, improving efficiency, etc. My advice is that NEVER EVER quantize your results if you’re unsure of them. Use facts and not your imagination. It could be FATAL.

Sometimes even the true scenarios are also considered as doubtful. I have seen people writing “As a business analyst, worked on customer requirements and shaped them into an additional business worth 1M)”. While in The USA this could be true due to the size of the operations but in Ireland and especially with an SME, it is most likely to be seen as doubtful due to a smaller size of business operations so one has to be very specific in clarifying a context behind a result.

4. Showing Desperation

Have you ever seen people writing on their LinkedIn Profile “Actively seeking Jobs in XXX” or Showing four different tiles on CV such as DevOps engineer/ Business Analyst / Change Manager/Project Analyst? These things most often just drive employers away. It usually creates an impression that you’re a person whom no one in the market is ready to take. In the market, people like to associate with winners and not with desperate people. Note: showing recruiters in LinkedIn (by customizing settings) that you’re open for new opportunities is different and does not perceive negatively.

5. CV “One Size Fits All”

This is also the most common mistake job seekers do. A perfect CV is just a myth. There can’t be a CV that is the perfect fit for all jobs. Many people have a job search strategy of having a one “Final” version of CV that is used for applying for all the jobs and when they don’t get desired results they just apply more and more. It further reduces the prospects. What they need to understand is that even a role of a QA engineer (for example) needs to have a customized CV since the job spec often has different requirements related to Domain, industry, specific tools, and level of customer interaction. Applying just with a master CV with few things relevant and not many often leads to rejection.

6. Cheap tricks

Sometimes people change their CV multiple times depending upon the job flow in the market that even they don’t realize how many types of their CV are floating in the market for how many roles. They often fail to understand that customizing the CV is different than having different versions of CV with different titles, roles, and responsibilities. Customization changes the focus of CV and highlights the special parts BUT does not change titles, designation, and core job duties.

Many times people try to act smart with the Application tracking software and use the many of the keywords mentioned in the job spec in their CV in WHITE color thinking that software will rank their CV higher. This is a crap and a bad assumption, most of the application software have the algorithm to root out such CV immediately.

I think this would be enough for today, I will come back with some more knowledge points in my next post. Hope that my post will help a few job seekers.

All the Best !!