5 CV Mistakes That Get Filtered Out Before a Human Ever Sees It

Most CV rejections aren't about qualifications. They're about small, fixable issues that never get flagged because no one tells you — the application just goes quiet. Here are five that come up constantly.

1. Contact info or work history locked inside an image

A stylish header graphic with your name and phone number looks good to a human eye and is invisible to most parsers. If your name doesn't parse, the rest of your application may never get properly filed under you.

2. Dates that don't parse as dates

"Summer 2022 – Present" or "2yrs, Jan" are readable to a person but ambiguous to software expecting a standard date format. Stick to "Month Year – Month Year" or "Month Year – Present."

3. Generic section headers that don't match expected fields

"My Journey" instead of "Work Experience," or "What I Bring" instead of "Skills," reads as creative to a person and as unrecognized to a parser expecting standard section names. Save the personality for your cover letter.

4. One CV for every application

Not tailoring at all is the most common mistake on this list, and the most costly — a generic CV reads as generic effort, and it under-uses keyword matching entirely, even when the underlying experience is a strong fit.

5. Padding a weak match with unrelated keywords

The overcorrection: stuffing in every term from the job posting regardless of whether it's true. This doesn't just risk getting caught in an interview — dense, context-free keyword lists are also increasingly recognized and discounted by more sophisticated ranking systems.

None of these require a rewrite to fix. They require a careful pass with the actual job posting open next to your CV — which is the exact gap a tailoring tool like Ripimoo is built to close in minutes instead of an evening.