So you’ve started networking your list of impeccably maintained contacts and are waiting for some leads. Great. How about that CV?

Here’s some groundbreaking news: Your CV isn’t your life story! In fact, I would guess that most CV’s get little more than a 10 second glance before being turfed, or hopefully, attract enough attention to actually get read. So here are the real purposes of your CV:

1. To attract the reader’s attention so that he/she reads it rather than turfs it

2. To highlight how you are different from the hundreds of other candidates who are sending in CV’s

3. To get you a face-to-face interview

4. To provide a road map that the interviewer will follow so that it takes him/her where you want to go rather than all over the map to places you may not wish to explore.

Here are a few CV killers in my humble opinion:

1. Typos – if you don’t care enough about your CV, how much are you going to care about your job? Spell Check, read, Spell Check again, and then have 2 friends read and Spell Check it too.

2. Grammar – don’t use words you don’t fully understand the meaning of, just to sound intelligent. Avoid jargon. Nothing makes people look dumber than mispronounced high-falluting words.

3. Size matters – there’s nothing worse than a CV longer than 2-3 pages (and 3 pages only if you’ve had a very long and fruitful career with many accomplishments, publications, etc.). A friend of  mine has put his whole career on a single PowerPoint slide…and he’s a 50 year-old a pharma company CEO! If you have 47 publications, save them for later, if I ask you. Just write “47 publications” in your CV under Other Accomplishments or something like that.

4. Degrees – if you haven’t completed the degree, please don’t imply that you have. For example:

BA Economics, University of Hawaii
32 credits completed

You don’t have the freaking degree, so don’t try to bamboozle me because you think I won’t notice! And by the way…uncompleted degrees are the kiss-of-death…they imply that you don’t have the stamina to see you through tough challenges. Just create a category under “Education” that says: “Other”, and then put “Completed six courses in Marketing” or whatever. If the reason you didn’t complete the degree was because you left school to care for your six young siblings after a fire killed your parents, save it for the interview, where you’ll actually have a chance to explain it and impress the interviewer with your guts.

5. Gaps – we all look for gaps in chronology. If you took maternity leave, were in drug rehab, or went to Africa for two years to find yourself….show it. I’m just looking at a CV I got yesterday, where the period between 2005-2007 seems to have mysteriously disappeared. If you don’t tell me what you were doing in that period, I will inevitably speculate that it’s something you’re ashamed of.

6. Hobbies and interests – one of my cardinal rules is: Don’t expose your values before you know the interviewer’s. Unless your hobbies and personal interests are relevant to the job, don’t bother listing them. For example, if you are a black belt in Karate, I may well envision you shit-kicking me after a negative performance appraisal or too-small pay increase. Similarly, when I see “Golf” listed under Hobbies, I immediately envision people effing off work every Friday afternoon to play! Save it for the interview once you’ve seen the guy’s Karate pictures or golf trophies.

6. Lies – Don’t! Avoid embellishment, lies, bullshit, or any other signs of low integrity. They will find you out during the interview and you will have wasted your time and theirs.