To stand out in today’s extremely competitive job market you must craft a strong graduate CV that gives prospective employers a good overview of your skills and achievements so they can assess your potential and suitability for a graduate role at their company. Here at Graduate Coach, we have reviewed thousands of graduate CVs over the past 15 years and have expertise in helping graduates transform their career prospects. In this post, we share 6 of the most common graduate CV mistakes we often see. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to review and edit your CV to ensure you stand out for the right reasons.
1: Graduate CVs that are too long
Recruiters and hiring managers scan over a CV in a matter of seconds. After all, they receive many applications and need to quickly compile a shortlist of candidates to progress to the next stage of the application process.
We often receive CVs that are more than 2 pages. We once reviewed a 12-page CV.
Graduate CVs should be one page, two at max.
Aside from recruiters and hiring managers not having a lot of time to initially scan over your CV, they want to see evidence of your ability to be concise and communicate the most important information clearly.
This is a skill you’ll need to demonstrate on the job. For example, if you need to conduct some research and write up a report for senior leadership, they will expect you to adopt a top down communication approach to clearly get across the most important information that facilitates decision making.
As a fresh graduate, you may feel inclined to bulk out your CV with additional details but this can do more harm than good.
Action point: review your CV. If it is more than 2 pages cut it down immediately. If you have a 2-page graduate CV, set yourself a challenge to condense it down to one page, only including the most important points that demonstrate your suitability and key employability skills.
2: Graduate CVs that are poorly formatted
The format of your CV is very important as it aids in readability – not only for humans but also for applicant tracking systems (ATS).
Your CV must have a clean, professional format with headings, consistent font sizes and styles and sufficient white space.
We have reviewed graduate CVs that contain massive paragraphs. Recruiters and hiring managers simply do not have the time to read through novels!
We also see graduate CVs created from elaborately designed templates using many different colours. We advise you to refrain from this especially if you are not applying for a creative graduate role. Our graduate CVs follow a clean and simple professional format optimised for readability.
Action point: review your graduate CV and ensure that the format is clean, clear and professional. Ensure that your font style and size are consistent and that the key sections are clearly visually distinct.
3. Graduate CVs that lack focus on achievements
Graduate recruiters and hiring managers need to gain an understanding of how likely you are to succeed in your role from your CV. If your CV is not achievement-based it will be difficult to assess your potential.
Your achievements must be clear and quantifiable.
We see far too many graduate CVs that simply list what they’ve done in work experience positions, instead of showing how their work added value to a company by increasing revenue, improving processes or solving key business problems.
Look at the following two points from a social media graduate CV to demonstrate this point:
Candidate A:
-Created social media posts across all platforms.
Candidate B:
-increased engagement on Instagram by 70% and doubled social media conversions in 6 months.
Which candidate makes it easier to assess the value they could bring to a company?
Candidate A simply describes a task they did. Most if not all applicants applying for the role would be able to create social media posts and share them across all platforms.
Candidate B demonstrates their impressive achievement. Demonstrating that they were able to double conversions in 6 months is extremely favourable. Remember this: past achievements predict future success. A prospective employer reviewing Candidate B’s CV will get a quantifiable idea of how well they will perform in the role.
Candidate B could elaborate slightly by briefly explaining how they achieved this I.e. creating a data-driven social media strategy.
Action point: review your graduate CV and for each point within the experience section, edit it to make it achievement-based. Include numbers and percentages as much as possible. This is bound to make you stand out from other graduates.
4. Using the same generic graduate CV for every application
You must tailor your CV to each role you apply for. If your CV seems very generic you can unintentionally come across as uninterested or unqualified. Employers are not only looking for candidates who are qualified for a role but who also genuinely want the role. If you can’t spare a few minutes to tweak your CV before sending it, do you really want the job?
We’ve helped many graduates land jobs who come to us after little success in securing a graduate role. Often their approach to their job search was creating one CV, then sending that CV to several companies.
Action point: In your next application, before you attach your CV, take some time to review the job spec and ensure that you tailor your CV to the needs of the role. If the role emphasises data analytics skills, edit your experience points to reflect your aptitude and achievements in this area.
5. Overcompensating in the education section
The education section of your CV should be relatively brief. After all, this section doesn’t allow you to differentiate yourself from other candidates much because 1) all other graduates will have a degree to show on their CV 2) most will have a 2:1 or a first-class degree 3) academic performance isn’t the strongest indicator of job performance.
Simply put, your degree alone is not enough to differentiate yourself from other candidates.
We’ve reviewed graduate CVs that list every single module taken from year 1 to year 3. This takes up significant real estate on your CV without necessarily impressing employers.
At a minimum, the education can include your degree title, classification, the university you attended and the dates you attended.
If relevant to the position you are applying for, you may wish to share one or two modules. You do not generally need to include your GCSEs and oftentimes, if a company would like to know your A-level grades and subjects they will request it on the application form.
Action point: review your CV and trim down the education section if needed. With the newly gained space, add to your experience section to showcase your achievements and skills.
6. Use the work experience to showcase university projects.
Whilst you may have developed and refined skills by engaging in university projects, employers are keen to get an overview of how you performed in paid positions or unpaid internships/work experience in a workplace setting.
Sometimes we find graduates have held a few positions such as in retail or tutoring other students but they omit this from their CV thinking it is not relevant to their graduate job. However, there are several transferable skills and achievements that can be demonstrated in the employment section from these positions.
If you have graduated with no work experience at all, you may significantly boost your chances of getting a place on a competitive graduate job or scheme by completing a short internship or work experience placement.
Action point: think carefully about all of your past jobs. Have you included them on your CV?
Conclusion
Your CV must give graduate recruiters and employers a good understanding of how you have performed in the past so they can predict your future potential and how well you might perform within their organisation. You must make your graduate CV achievement-based and quantify your successes to aid the hiring manager’s decision to shortlist you for the interview stages. Avoid making the 6 most common mistakes above to increase your chances of success.
Featured image by Sora Shimazaki from Pexels
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