Although everyone can make mistakes when preparing their CV, some of them are more specific to students. Some are caused by the fact that they have less experience but also because of a lack of attention to details, a quality we tend to acquire later in life. Here are some of the mistakes students should avoid on their next employment search.

Adapt the CV According to the Position

One mistake students often make is to prepare one CV and consider the job done. They then go on using it for all their job applications. However, a generic CV will often miss the mark in the eyes of the person reading it. When you don’t take in account the specific field that you are applying into, you provide a lot of useless information, which drowns the important content and removes you from a potential candidacy. To learn how to be more specific and find other successful CV ideas, take a look at these tips by CVmaker.

Create a Structure 

A CV, like most things in life, should flow. If it doesn’t, it will feel like there is a cog stuck in the wheel for the reader, creating sufficient uneasiness to pass on to the next candidate. How do you get a CV to flow? By organizing it. If you are able to create a pathway that leads the reader to move on from one point to the next, chances are he will go through the whole information, augmenting greatly your chances at getting the job. If it is well structured, it will also be easy for the person in charge to go back to the points he wants to review a second time. This is particularly difficult for students to do, as structure often comes with experience and knowledge.

Provide the Right Information

Using templates is a great idea, especially professional ones, but students often have a problem with details and if you don’t review all the information before sending it out, you may end up sending a CV featuring the name, address or phone number from the fictitious person used on the template. That is enough to cost you the job or the internship. If the employer can’t reach you, they will just move on to the next candidate. Therefore, you need to make time for proof-reading, not once or twice but many times. Do a once over when you are finished writing down the information then take a break in read it again in 15 minutes. Once you have slept on it, do another proof-read. That is often where we catch the most mistakes. And then do it once more, just to be safe.

Selecting Clear and Easy to Read Templates

Younger individuals sometimes tend to think that more is better. In a CV, it is certainly not the case. What the reader is looking for is not your artistic vision (unless you are an artist, of course) so you don’t need to impress him with a colourful and complex design. You want the focus to remain on your skills and qualifications. In a few words, you need to keep it short and simple.