Five things guaranteed to get your CV binned by recruiters

Times are tough, jobs are thin on the ground and competition is stiff. In this environment, it's important that your CV is not only flawless, but guaranteed to grab the attention of any potential employer or recruitment consultant.

While it's important to know how to sell your CV, it's equally as integral to ensure that it's free from things that will immediately elicit a sigh, followed by a swift move to the delete button by recruiters.

Keeping your CV free of spelling and grammatical errors is obvious, but here are five other complaints from recruiters that are surprisingly common and guaranteed to dent your chances of finding a new job.

1) A lack of relevant information

If you've made it to the senior ranks, you might feel that your reputation comes before your CV, and that simply stating your job title and current employer is enough to inspire gasps of awe from any potential employer. You'd be wrong, though.

"Senior candidates, perhaps surprisingly, are reticent to talk about their experience - or specifically, their achievements in particular roles," says Samia Hafidi, managing consultant at recruiters Hudson in Dubai. "When we ask for more detail, they tend to act like we're prying unnecessarily."

"One candidate just said they were very senior at Goldman Sachs, but offered no other elucidation. It's just not enough," adds James Collin, business manager, banking at Reed Specialist Recruitment.

2) Taking an obvious scatter gun approach

It's common to tailor your CV for a particular role, highlighting certain achievements while excluding others, depending on which position you're applying for. This approach is less effective when you're applying speculatively. Recruiters suggest that it's relatively common for candidates to get in touch out of the blue, attaching, say, five different CVs in one e-mail for various different types of roles they're interested in.

"We're not going to spend time digging out roles for various different types of expertise, when it's very obvious the candidate is a complete speculator," says one head of a financial services recruiter in Dubai.

3) A complete lack of logic to the layout

When outlining your experience, it's important to follow a very simple format - reverse chronological order. Don't leave any unexplained gaps and certainly, as many seem to do in the Middle East, promote the role you're most proud of to the top, even if it's not your latest job.

"If there's no transparency about dates of employment, and an attempt to highlight the importance of a particular role rather than its chronological order, something is clearly awry," says Martin McDermott, operations manager at Gulf Connexions. "People tend to do the same with qualifications - highlighting every course they've undertaken since leaving school, rather than their key achievements."

4) Eccentric formatting

McDermott points to the importance of keeping your CV simple - using bullet points, keeping it below two pages and using a "classic business font" to ensure professionalism.

However, some people go further than just using Comic Sans as their CV font. "We've had a few people pulling out their key achievements in luminous yellow highlights," says Hafidi. "This wouldn't have been too bad, except that it was engrained with a Macro, and made it impossible for us to reformat."

5) An unnecessary exuberance about revealing personal details

In the Middle East employers like to know a little more about you than other parts of the world. Nationality, age, marital status, number of children - all of these are considered fair game in terms of assessing a candidates' suitability for a particular job.

There's such a thing as being over-zealous though. Hafidi says that she's seen instances of people revealing their weight and height within their personal details section, while Collin says in some cases people have included how many pets they have. Suffice to say, this sort of information is surplus to requirements, and could even count against you.