Recruiters spend an average of six to eight seconds on a first pass of a CV. That's not enough time to read a sentence, let alone your whole career — it's enough time to scan for red flags. Here are the ten that cost people interviews, and how to fix each one in minutes.
"Motivated professional seeking opportunities" tells a recruiter nothing about what you actually do. Replace it with your actual role and specialty: "Front-End Developer — React & Design Systems." It should be scannable in under two seconds.
If your most relevant role isn't in the top third of the page, most readers won't get to it. Order sections by relevance to the job you want, not strictly by date — a well-organized CV can lead with the experience that matters most.
"Responsible for managing social media" describes a job description, not your performance in it. Compare it to: "Grew Instagram following from 2K to 40K in eight months." Numbers are what get remembered.
A CV tuned for a specific role will always beat a generic one, even if the generic one is objectively "better written." Match the language in the job posting where it's true — many companies still scan for keywords before a human ever opens the file.
For design, development, writing, and most creative roles, a link to real work outweighs another paragraph of description. If you don't have a portfolio page yet, that's the single highest-leverage thing to fix this week.
Three different fonts, uneven spacing, a date format that changes halfway down the page — none of these are dealbreakers alone, but together they read as carelessness. Pick one template and stay consistent, or use one that enforces consistency for you.
Contact information belongs at the very top, and it should be an email you actually check. "coolguy2009@" undermines an otherwise strong CV in a way that's completely avoidable.
Listing "leadership" as a skill means nothing without a sentence showing it in action. Tie every claimed skill to something you actually did with it, even briefly.
A single typo near the top does disproportionate damage, because it's the first thing establishing whether the rest is worth reading carefully. Read your CV out loud once before sending it — it catches things silent proofreading misses.
A PDF is table stakes, but a public, linkable CV page means anyone — a recruiter forwarding your name internally, a hiring manager on their phone — can open it instantly, no download required. That's exactly the gap a tool like myCv is built to close.
None of these fixes take long. Most take fifteen minutes. What they buy you is more time in front of an actual reader — which is the whole game.
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