TL;DR
47% of UK hiring managers reject CVs over careless writing. For senior roles, 64%. The mistakes that hurt most are the ones that signal you did not proofread, not the ones that are technically obscure.
What recruiters actually see
When a recruiter reads your CV, they are not editing it. They are inferring. Every typo is a tiny piece of evidence about how you work, how you check things, how much you care.
The top seven CV-killing errors
- Contact details misspelled or out of date
- Company names typed wrong
- Tense inconsistency in a single role
- Inconsistent date format throughout
- "I" in some bullets but not others
- British/American English mixed
- Currency symbols missing on financial achievements
Fix these seven and you catch 80%+ of what loses interviews.
The British English trap
Your grammar checker is silently changing analyse to analyze, optimise to optimize, centre to center. Each is a subtle signal to a UK manager that you did not check your work. Set your language to English (UK) explicitly.
The proofreading process
At CVPilot we automate the catch for inconsistent tense, mixed dialects, and date format drift. But there is no substitute for the print-and-read-aloud method first.
What's the worst typo you've spotted on your own CV after hitting send?
