Nine CV mistakes that get applications rejected

Typos and lies are the mistakes everyone warns about. These are the ones that look fine and still cost you the interview.

1. A CV exported as an image

Some design tools outline the fonts on export. The file looks perfect and contains no text, so an applicant tracking system reads nothing at all.

Test it: open your PDF and try to select a sentence. If nothing highlights, no parser can read it either. Check yours here.

2. Contact details in the page header or footer

Header and footer content sits outside the main text flow and many parsers skip it entirely — producing a candidate record with no email address. It looks tidy and it is the most damaging layout choice on this list.

Keep your name and contact details in the body of the first page.

3. Listing duties instead of achievements

"Responsible for the monthly close" restates your job title. "Cut the month-end close from nine days to four by standardising reconciliations" tells someone what happens if they hire you.

Every bullet should survive the question: so what?

4. One CV sent everywhere

The reader can tell. Tailoring does not mean rewriting — changing the summary's last sentence and reordering three bullets to match the advert takes five minutes and is the highest-return editing you can do.

5. Two columns for a portal application

Two-column layouts interleave when flattened to plain text, and the reading order scrambles. Fine when emailing a person directly; risky through a large employer's careers portal. Keep a single-column version.

6. Wide letter-spacing on headings

Tracked-out capitals look designed and extract as S U M M A R Y, which matches nothing a system searches for. A parser looking for your experience section will not find it.

7. An unexplained gap

The gap is not the problem. The silence is. One line — "Career break, family caregiving, 2023–2024" — closes the question completely, and its absence leaves the reader to invent an answer.

8. A stale or broken link

A portfolio URL that 404s, a LinkedIn profile last updated in 2019, a GitHub full of empty tutorial repositories. Each of these is worse than no link, because the reader followed it.

9. Burying the thing you are best at on page two

Readers give a CV seconds, not minutes, and they start at the top. If your strongest achievement is the fourth bullet of your second role, it will not be read.

Put it first. Reorder in the builder — sections and entries both move — and check the result with the ATS checker.