People spend weeks on a CV and minutes on everything else. Then the rejections arrive and the CV gets rewritten again. Most of the time the document was never the problem; what happened around it was.
The document itself
One CV sent to every company is the most common mistake and the easiest to spot from the other side. A reader can tell within a paragraph whether the document was written for this role or for a category of roles.
Claiming skills you do not have is the second. It survives the screening and collapses in the interview, which is a worse outcome than not being shortlisted, because you have now spent someone's time and your own credibility.
Listing a title you did not hold is a version of the same thing with legal edges. If the company verifies employment, and many do, a mismatch between your CV and your employer's records ends the process regardless of how well the interviews went.
And then the quieter failure: a CV that lists responsibilities rather than outcomes. Managed a team, coordinated a project, responsible for reporting. None of that says what changed because you were there.
A reader can tell within a paragraph whether the document was written for this role or for a category of roles.
How it gets sent
An email with no subject line and no message, just an attachment, arrives as an inconvenience. Someone has to open the file to find out what it is about and who you are. Enough people do this that not doing it is an advantage.
If a mutual contact referred you, the referral belongs in the first line of the email, not in the attachment and not left to be discovered. A referral that goes unmentioned is a referral that was wasted, and the person who gave it will notice.
Applying to several different roles at the same company reads as availability rather than intent. The recruiter sees the pattern before the hiring manager sees any single application, and the conclusion is that you want a job rather than that job.
Applying to roles that clearly do not fit does the same damage more slowly. Each application is a data point, and a series of mismatched ones tells a company you have not read them carefully.
Overqualified and underqualified applications fail differently, and both fail quietly. A company reading a CV well above the role assumes you will leave when something better appears, and they are usually right. One well below it does not get read at all. Neither rejection comes with an explanation, so the applicant keeps sending the same document to the same two extremes.
References
Naming someone as a reference without asking them first is a small thing that goes wrong loudly. The call comes, they are unprepared, and the hesitation in their voice is the answer the company hears.
Asking is the minimum. The useful version is telling them what role it is, what the company is looking for, and which part of your work is relevant, so the reference speaks to the thing being assessed rather than to a general impression.
The part that is not the CV
A great CV gets you read. It does not get you hired, and treating the application as a document-preparation exercise is the mistake underneath most of the others.
What happens alongside it matters as much. Whether your LinkedIn agrees with your CV on dates and titles, because a recruiter will check and any gap between them becomes a question. Whether you can explain a career break in one sentence without sounding defensive. Whether anyone inside the company knows your name before your application arrives.
And whether your network exists before you need it. A message that begins with a request, sent to someone you have not spoken to in four years, is a cold email with a warm subject line. People help people they already have some relationship with; that relationship cannot be built in the week you start applying.
Where I come into this
I do not write CVs. I send the structure and the criteria, and roughly eighty per cent of the writing is yours. What I work on is the layer above the document: which roles are worth applying to, in what order, and what has to be true before the application goes out.
That usually means fewer applications rather than more. A shortlist of six roles that genuinely fit, each approached deliberately, does more than sixty sent in a week.
Is it the writing, or the decision?
We start with a short form. Six questions, two minutes. Which of the two needs work is usually clear on a first read.