Spotting Anomalies on a CV

I was always taught that CVs were just tips of icebergs, and as they say whatever you see on the surface of an iceberg it only gets bigger when you take a look beneath it. As such, I’m always very wary when assessing CVs and interviewing folk if something comes up which just doesn’t look quite right. A slight embellishment or little white lie can turn into something much more serious if you’re not careful. Our future business is totally dependant upon the integrity of who we place now, so I’m always on the look out for anything that doesn’t look quite right.

It’s a given that you will need to assess a CVs content against your job spec. When you are looking at CVs day in day out, you do get more and more aware of smaller things which raise concerns. In most cases, it may not be a deal breaker but more something to inspect closer either on the phone or face to face. Here are some of the most obvious things I look for.

Consistency across different media

Cross check the CV versus their linkedin profile. It surprising today how many people’s CVs don’t match their linkedin profile. I’ve seen everything from embellished job titles, massaged job descriptions, dates changed to mask gaps in employment even down to some employments being erased due to something going wrong that they’d like to hide.

This type of thing is not new. Historically we have seen many a CV come in that we perhaps have had on a database going back many years, and when comparing the two, the more recent has clearly made ‘favourable’ changes to the earlier history. I guess from the candidates point of view, who is going to be able to verify things in years gone by, so why not make a few subtle changes to improve their chances. Unfortunately, a tendency to be ‘flexible’ with the truth is likely to be a consistent feature if you proceed to hire!

Frequent movers (job hoppers)

This has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. When I started recruiting, I considered any employment under 2 years as requiring particularly close inspection. The immediate concern being that it’s ended due to poor performance, or falling out with a manager or other employees, all of which raise alarm bells. If someone left a role 2 or 3 times in a row within 2 years, we would label them as a ‘hopper’ along with the assumption that regardless of the reasons why they’ve moved they will most likely always job hop every year or 2 and hence are not a great prospect.

Within pharmaceuticals things have changed. Not that I wouldn’t look so closely at job moves, but these days it is quite common to see someone with multiple consecutive job moves, all of which are attributable to large scale redundancy and not related to anything likely to reflect a persons ability or integrity. Today, I’m less likely to write off a CV on paper due to frequency of job moves without at least asking questions to establish the detail.

Continuity of dates

Another surprisingly common occurrence is a lack of continuity with dates. In one memorable interview, many years back now, I reached the end of an interview to suddenly notice there seemed to be a year missing in the middle of the CV. The question, as I assumed a mere typo produced a pregnant pause followed by a red face culminating in a confession of GBH in a pub and a year in prison.

If you are a candidate reading this, if you leave a gap somewhere on the CV and I spot it, I’m going to assume that gap is something you don’t want me to see!! Also, returning back to the cross check with Linkedin, any difference in dates listed on the two should ring alarm bells.

Reasons for leaving

When I interview, this is always an essential element. Establishing the details around someone’s career choices and moves alone can give great insight into character, motivation and more. Despite this being something I would expect any decent recruiter to coach a candidate on, reasons for leaving should always be positive, and often aren’t. Even if a manager was awful, and they received a pay cut this year, far better to say “it’s been great but I want to develop and broaden my horizons”

If someone routinely gives negative reasons (especially if they’ve come via an agency) then this should be given careful consideration. It is possible that the company really were treating staff badly, or a product was struggling company wide etc. But if a candidate presents multiple, albeit plausible, negative reasons for job moves it can often signify someone who is likely to attribute future failures externally and so not take ownership of their own performance.

CV layout

I would be the first to confess my written English is far from perfect and my spelling is awful. When Laptops first appeared on the scene (giving my age away!) I was a manager at Astra. In a room full of managers I was the first to ask why so many words were underlined in red….and did the red lined appear if you print!

Regardless of one’s ability with the English language, given the importance to one’s future of a CV, I become concerned with obvious and simple flaws in appearance. If if your not a grammatical wizard, or any good with IT, you can always have a it checked by someone that is if it matters enough.

The most common but simple error are varying fonts throughout the CV, it often just looks untidy before you realise why. Most peoples’ CV has been built up over their career, added to as they’ve completed new employments, transferred from computer to computer over the years. So it’s easy to imagine how you end up with a few different fonts. To the reader it just looks like a lack of care and attention which may be the tip of the iceberg for other less than desirable qualities.

If you are a candidate reading this, formatting does vary from computer to computer. You may find your neatly organised boxes on your computer produces unreadable overlapping boxes elsewhere. The answer is to save it as a PDF, so it looks then same at the destination as it does on your screen.

As a recruiter assessing CVs, my rule of thumb is if I’m not sure I will go ahead and screen someone, just to avoid missing someone who is better than they look on paper. However, what I would say is that when people are poor at interview, it is often possible to go back to the CV and see some of these tell tale patterns which could have alerted concerns from the outset. If I was a client company, I may be more brutal with my filtering.