How you may or may not know: I'm helping students and young professionals with CV building.
I have been doing it for 4 months now, and during this time, I have helped 25+ students to take their CV to the next level!
During that time, I had an opportunity to see the most common mistakes people make in a CV.
Today, we will look at the 3 most common mistakes that you need to avoid, if you want to land those interviews after the application 🔮
1. Rating your skill level
Now and then, I see someone rating their skill level to be:
This is, in general, the worst thing you can do to your resume:
- You are underestimating yourself!
- Please do not try to do recruiters' job for them, these people have education and get paid for choosing candidates with the right skills!
- There is no real value in the suggestion that your Python programming skills are 3/5. First of all, you will introduce bias in the recruiter's head, what if they are only considering 5/5 Pythonists (???)
Please, stay away from any assumptions about your technical skills!
However, it is still acceptable to provide your language knowledge level in the following format:
Italian (Advanced) or English (Native)
2. Providing personal information
It is not a secret that all humans have a biased perception of any information they process.
The same is true for HR professionals who review your CV: They too unconsciously make their mind about the candidate based on ALL the information they get.
That means that by increasing the amount of personal information in your CV (e.g. age, nationality, gender, residence status), you increase the chances of being disliked by the reviewer.
Your job as an applicant is to make yourself as attractive as possible.
By limiting personal information in your CV, you do exactly that! 🗽
If you want to know more about building a good CV, check out my article about
3. Big chunks of text
Are your enemy!
Members of the HR department of any company receive thousands of applications for each job posting.
Even though 99% of them are filtered out by ATS (Application Tracking Systems), at the end of the day, they are still left with dozens of CVs to review.
Meaning that most likely your CV will have 10–30 seconds to make an impression.
If CV is full of bullet points, easy to read, then that time will be spent learning valuable information about the candidate.
BUT if your CV is a giant text junk, this time will be spent reading the first few lines, before throwing it away 🚧
That's it for today!
