Is there something on your CV scaring potential employers away?  I asked my clients what puts them off when they’re hiring – their top 3 reasons are below.

You sound like a zombie

Is your CV full of corporate clichés such as “good team player with the ability to work well alone” or “tenacious new business hunter”?  These statements could well be true but sound incredibly generic and come up time and time again, making your CV blend in with the rest of the drone.  Try to find ways to describe your skills and achievements using your own voice as opposed to the standard spiel.

It’s covered in cobwebs

Lots of people, on deciding they’d like to apply for a new job, simply get out their old CV from god-knows-how many years ago and add an extra bit at the top to describe their current role.  That’s it.  What you should be doing is looking at your CV as a whole and re-shaping it to truly reflect the person you are now.  A lot will have changed since you last wrote your CV and it can end up reading like a CV written by two different people.  Dust the cobwebs off the document as a whole, because employers will certainly be looking at it as a whole.

It’s all Tricks and no Treats

Everyone wants to be able to ‘talk up’ their achievements on their CV in order to impress and this is absolutely fine.  However, when you do so you need to make sure you have a decent story to substantiate it or you risk looking daft.  Saying that you were “Central to the delivery of £45m revenue in pumpkin sales in October for a large supermarket chain” is fine, and is something your potential employer is likely to ask you about.  If they then find out that this was when you had a holiday job shelf-stacking in 2002 they’re probably going to be less than impressed and start to question all the genuinely great stuff on your CV too!