In the current climate, recruiters are being deluged with CVs from IT professionals in the financial sector, which means that their time and tolerance for mistakes is diminished.

Some mistakes candidates make are both frustrating and surprisingly common among the financial technology community. If any of the points below ring a bell, it's time to shake up your CV.

1) Length to rival a James Joyce novel

Keeping your CV to two pages is, of course, a common piece of advice. Within the financial technology space, where recruiters are looking for technology skills, career history and product knowledge, four sides of A4 is considered acceptable.

Some go over the top, however. Recruiters we spoke to complained of CVs sometimes reaching seven, 10 or even 15 pages. Obviously, this is over-kill.

"On one occasion a candidate had outlined the work he'd undertaken for Midland Bank in 1987," says Martin Rennison, head of investment banking IT at recruiters the JM Group. "Because technology develops so fast, it's arguable that even the work they did before 2002 isn't relevant to the current market, so you need to be selective in what experience you include."

2) Overplaying technical skills

If you're working in a development role, it’s customary to include details of your technical skills in a box out towards the top of your CV, and then expand on these within your career history. If you're thinking of putting something in that you've only had vague experience with, however, don't bother.

"It's frustrating if a candidate includes a technology or coding language that they've only really touched on in their skill-sets," says Adam Pizzie, manager – IT at Robert Walters. "Some do this to ensure greater visibility on key word searches, but we want to see evidence of exactly how this skill-set has been applied."

3) Business analysts lacking an eye for detail

Ensuring grammatical accuracy is a basic requirement of any CV, but it's inevitable that mistakes occasionally creep in. For developers, recruiters are usually willing to overlook such a lapse, but they're less forgiving if business analysts' CVs are sloppy.

"If you spend much of your day creating clear, concise documentation as part of your job, but then you can't spend enough time to accurately proof-read your CV, it's unacceptable," says Rennison.

4) Vague references about project involvement

If, say, you've spent the past two years working as a Java developer at a top tier investment bank on a flow equity derivatives platform, what have you actually achieved? How much involvement have you had in the project and what contribution did you make that ultimately made that programme successful?

"It's all very well stating that you're a team player, or that you have exposure to the front office, for example, but really we want to see your key achievements and what specific responsibilities you had," says Ben Cowan, director at recruiters Astbury Marsden.

"We want to know the size of the project and the scope of your involvement with it," adds Pizzie. "Listing your duties isn't going to make you stand out in this competitive job market."

5) Formatting akin to a child's birthday party invitation

Yes, you may have top notch technology skills and be a master of the dark art of Microsoft Word, but recruiters want a CV to be clean, concise and professional.

"A lot of people like to highlight key skills in lurid colours or create boxes and tables to draw attention to particular experience or attributes. Just keep it simple," says Cowan.