Five CV mistakes that cost you the interview.

The top of your CV is prime real estate. Most job seekers waste it. Here are the five mistakes I saw most often in 12 years of recruiting — and they show up in strong candidates, not just junior ones.

Mistake 1: burying the lede

Your most recent, most relevant role should be the first thing I see after your name. Not a personal statement. Not a skills cloud. Not a "core competencies" section with 18 bullet points of "Excel, Teamwork, Communication."

If I have to scroll to find out what you do now, you lost me.

Mistake 2: describing duties instead of outcomes

Bad: "Responsible for managing the product roadmap."

Better: "Owned the product roadmap for a team of 12; shipped 3 of 4 quarterly commits, delaying the 4th by 2 weeks after a technical scope change."

The second version tells me you owned something, shipped something, and can talk honestly about a miss. That's the full triangle of signal.

Duties tell me what your manager asked you to do. Outcomes tell me what you actually did. — Every hiring manager, always

Mistake 3: no numbers, anywhere

Numbers are load-bearing on a CV. A bullet without a number is a vibe; a bullet with a number is evidence.

You don't need to have grown revenue 400%. You can count:

• People you managed or mentored (3 engineers, 2 designers)
• Budget you were responsible for (EUR 400k)
• Time saved (cut review cycles from 3 weeks to 5 days)
• Users affected (feature used by 2M MAU)
• Quality (shipped with zero P0 bugs for 8 months)

Mistake 4: kitchen-sink skills section

A skills section listing 34 technologies tells me you want to match every keyword, which tells me you don't know your actual strengths. It also triggers ATS penalty logic in some systems.

Keep it to 8-12 skills that you'd be happy to be interviewed on, in depth. If you can't defend "SQL" for 20 minutes, take it off.

Mistake 5: one CV for every job

This is the biggest one. Most candidates write one CV in January and send it to 60 companies by March. Don't.

You don't need to rewrite everything. You need to:

1. Rewrite the summary to match the role.
2. Reorder bullets so the most relevant ones are on top of each job.
3. Swap 2-3 skills to match the job's keywords.

Ten minutes per application. 3x the callback rate, in our data.

The meta-fix

If you're doing all five of these, that's normal. Every candidate I ever worked with made at least three. The fix is not to sweat over it alone for a weekend — it's to get feedback early, iterate fast, and tailor per application.

FacileCV's AI rewrite tool handles most of the mechanical work — turning duty-bullets into outcome-bullets, suggesting numbers to add, and tailoring to a pasted job description. The judgment — what to emphasise, what to cut — is still yours.