Put Yourself in the Recruiter's Shoes

Most hiring managers in the UK are not reading your CV over a leisurely coffee. They are skimming it between meetings, with a shortlist to fill and a deadline attached. That reality should shape every choice you make on the page. The mistakes below are rarely about a lack of qualifications or ambition. They are small presentation decisions that let capable candidates slip through unnoticed, and the encouraging news is that every one of them can be fixed in an afternoon.

Vague Personal Statements and Buzzword Soup

"A hardworking and motivated individual with excellent communication skills, seeking a challenging role within a dynamic organisation." Recruiters see versions of this sentence hundreds of times a year. It feels safe to write, but it tells the reader nothing they could not have guessed, and it wastes the most valuable space on the page.

Common offenders include:

• "Results-driven professional." Which results? Name one.
• "Excellent team player." Show a team you worked in and what you delivered together.
• "Passionate about the sector." Fine, but only if you can point to something you actually did about it.

The fix: replace the summary with three or four tight lines that state your job title, sector, years of experience and one concrete proof point. Something like "Operations coordinator with five years in food distribution, managing a weekly delivery schedule for 40 retail sites and cutting late deliveries by a third" gives a recruiter a reason to keep reading. Specificity always beats polish.

Unexplained Gaps That Raise More Questions Than They Answer

A gap in your employment history is not a red flag in itself, particularly after the past few years. What worries recruiters is silence. If a reader has to guess why you were out of work between March 2021 and January 2022, they will usually assume the worst, which is unfair to you and entirely avoidable.

You do not need to overshare. A short, factual line is enough:

• Career break for parental leave or caring responsibilities
• Full-time study, retraining or professional qualifications
• Planned travel or a period abroad
• Freelance, temporary or contract work that falls outside a neat timeline
• Redundancy following a restructure or company closure

If you did anything at all during that period, mention it. Volunteering, a short course, a side project or part-time work all count, and they show continuity rather than drift. Dates should stay consistent in format throughout, so a six-month gap does not look like a typo.

Cramped Layouts and the Wall of Text

Squeezing four pages of dense paragraphs onto two pages by shrinking the font to 9pt is a false economy. Recruiters skim, and a solid block of text is harder to skim than it is to skip. Your content may be excellent, but it will not be read.

Practical adjustments that make an immediate difference:

• Use a body font between 10.5pt and 11.5pt, and keep margins at roughly 1.5cm to 2cm.
• Break achievements into bullet points, keeping each to one or two lines.
• Use clear section headings, consistent date formatting and space between roles.
• Aim for two pages unless you are a senior candidate with a genuinely long track record.
• Save and send as a PDF unless the employer asks for another format, so your layout holds.

White space is not wasted space. It guides the eye and signals confidence.

Claims Without Evidence, and the Numbers That Fix Them

The strongest CVs do not just describe duties. They show the scale and outcome of your work. Compare "responsible for managing social media accounts" with "managed five social media accounts, growing follower engagement by 60% in nine months". The second version does not boast; it simply reports.

As you rewrite each bullet, ask yourself three questions. How many? How much? What changed as a result? Numbers, percentages, budgets, team sizes, timeframes and volumes all add credibility. If you genuinely cannot quantify something, describe the outcome in plain terms: a process you simplified, a problem you resolved, a client you retained. Even approximate figures are more persuasive than none, as long as you can back them up in an interview.

Tailoring and the Final Proofread

Sending the same CV to thirty employers rarely works as well as sending a tailored version to eight. Read the job description closely and mirror its language where it honestly reflects what you have done. Move the most relevant experience higher up, and cut the detail that does not serve this particular application, however proud you are of it.

Then do the boring part properly. Check that your contact details are current, that your email address is professional, and that your dates add up. Read the whole document aloud, because your ear catches errors your eye will skip. Ask someone else to check it, and if you can, leave it overnight before a final read. A clean, specific, well-spaced CV will not win you a job on its own, but it will get you in front of the people who can offer you one.