12 Viruses In Your Cv - Career

Errors/mistakes in CVs is also an area which has been widely written on, but most of the articles are filled with conflicting dos and don’ts thus putting job seekers in more confusion. We will attempt to identify some likely ‘dents’ in most job seekers CVs.

1. Copy & Paste Syndrome: Almost all of us are guilty of this, right? I was going through the CV of an applicant for a driver’s job few months ago, the young man can neither read nor write (because he could not fill a form given to him) yet his hobbies are reading and writing. In another case, a very smart looking fresh graduate was referred to me, I asked him questions relating to his course of study he did not do well until I addressed him as Economics graduate when he snapped in to ‘correct’ me that he studied business administration not Economics, I had no choice but to refer him to the CV he gave me. Oh! He exclaimed, “I am sorry I used my friend’s CV, I forgot to change the course of study”. Many job seekers inject their CVs with this kind of virus. Most times your person and background differ from the person whose CV you are adopting.

2. Unnecessary information: Fresh graduates are mostly guilty of this. Just to make sure their CV is ‘full’, they add "viruses" to it. Who says a one page CV cannot do better than two pages? What business of the recruiter is your home town or your religious denomination? He will find out those if he needs them before hiring you.

3. The‘Jokey’ email address: Yeah! The content of your email address matters. Trust me, nobody will be comfortable sending interview invitation to beerlover@yahoo.com or hotlips@gmail.com for a position. Check if your email address qualifies for ‘jockey’ one and rid your CV of that virus.

4. Incorrect/Insufficient Personal/Contact Details: While going through some CVs for the post of ICT manager many months ago, I saw a very good CV (a candidate with the requisite experience and skills for the job), I went back to the top of the CV to invite him for interview, lo and behold! His contact information was missing. Other job seekers carelessly miss a letter or sign in their email addresses. While yet another set omit a number or mix numbers up in their contact phone numbers. All these are bottle necks to invitations for interviews.

5. Design and format: I once saw a CV so nicely designed that I stopped for a while to look at the aesthetic value of the CV. Guess what? The aesthetics drew my attention away from the content of the CV and as such the owner missed the opportunity of having the content of his CV assessed. Similarly, some CVs are badly formatted (using different font style inappropriately) that one wonders if they were not actually designed to put the recruiter off. These are viruses to CVs.

6. Telling Lies in your CV: It is unfortunate that the competition in the labour market makes most job seeker stoop so low to the extent of putting false information in their CVs. Unfortunately for them, experienced HR professionals are good at identifying such lies.
7. Writing a Novel as CV: The longest CV I have seen is 17 pages for the post of operations manager, isn’t that amazing? He was actually invited for interview to come and prove that he is not wasteful. And that was the question he battled with all through. Some recruiters are even of the opinion that two pages is the maximum for fresh graduates.

8. Using Photo: I sometimes wonder who started the photo thing in Nigeria. In case you don’t know, printing CVs with pictures consumes more printer ink than CV without pictures. Apart from this, instead of judging the content of your CV the recruiter’s attention is shifted to the object in the CV (your picture) and this might reduce your chances of fair assessment of your CV. This may be the norm in Far East and Europe, but sorry it doesn’t apply to us here (unless you are applying for a role in the fashion/modelling industry). When recruiters need your picture, they specifically request for it.

9. Spelling Mistakes, Typos and Grammatical Errors: How will you feel if you are looking through a CV and come across “I have had sex jobs so far…” instead of six jobs so far? This virus (typos, spelling and grammatical errors) has been over flogged, so no point dwelling much on it. The good news is, hiring managers are not grammarians and as such they are not after your spelling mistakes, typographic or grammatical errors. It becomes an issue, and a serious one, if the flaws are visible enough to be noticed.

10. Leaving out Information or Creating Gap: I may not blame you for not being employed, for a while after graduating from the university etc. I will only see you as a bad hire if the vacuum shows in your CV without you accounting for it productively. So if you have that in your CV then it is a virus. Make productive use of the gap.

11. Duties instead of Accomplishments: Highlighting the duties of the job you were/are doing is a waste of space. Rather than saying what your duties were/are, why not state what you were/are able to accomplish while performing those duties?

12. Irrelevant Experience: In as much as we cannot justifiably fault recruiters decision to hire applicants with work experience, Job seekers should not leverage on that to give irrelevant work experience. Two weeks of relevant work experience is more valuable to a prospective employer than two years of shelves stacking (except you are applying to work in a book shop or library). Rather than give irrelevant work experience, why not identify the aspect of what you’ve got that tallies with your target job?

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