He's viewed more than 20,000 CVs, so what mistakes does Google’s chief of HR Laszlo Bock consider to be the worst?
Google’s chief of HR, Laszlo Bock, says he has personally viewed more than 20,000 CVs in his career, so it's fairly safe to assume he knows a thing or two about what makes a good, or bad, CV.
Bock, who heads People Operations at Google, recently shared with LinkedIn followers the most common mistakes he sees on CVs.
For the HR expert, typos are the number one red flag on a CV and one that keeps happening far too often. In fact, he mentions a 2013 CareerBuilder survey that found that as many as 58 per cent of CVs contain typos.
“People who tweak their resumes the most carefully can be especially vulnerable to this kind of error, because they often result from going back again and again to fine tune your resume just one last time. And in doing so, a subject and verb suddenly don’t match up, or a period is left in the wrong place, or a set of dates gets knocked out of alignment,” says Bock.
“Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality,” he adds.
According to Bock, lengthy CVs should also be on an HR manager's rejection list. The rule of thumb, he says, is one page per 10 years of work experience. Formatting is also a big issue, as he says many CVs aren’t clean or even legible enough.
Bock has also come across CVs revealing confidential company information which, in his opinion, should also mean instant rejection. Lastly, he says HR managers should turn down any CVs with blatant lies. In the age of the internet, any lies can easily be uncovered.
In the opinion of Google’s head of HR, these are the things that can send a CV straight to the recycling bin. What do you look for in a good CV?
