What to leave off your CV

Your CV should be focused on providing information directly aimed at getting you into an interview with a prospective employer.  As well as ensuring that your CV shows all the skills and experience that you have to offer, you also need to ensure that there is no unnecessary information that will distract or waste the time of the recruiter or possibly result in your CV being discarded. 

Examples of unnecessary information would be:

• marital and family status;
• your early primary education;
• your past-times, particularly if they are totally irrelevant to the job you are applying for;
• junior qualifications which have now been superseded by more recent senior qualifications;
• your reasons for leaving your previous jobs;
• where you were born;
• nationality, this is unnecessary unless you are a foreign national and will need support from a prospective employer to assist you to obtain the right to work in a particular country;

• your early career, employers only really want to know about the last ten to fifteen years;

• birth date or age, employers should not take this into account in assessing a prospective recruit;

• your religious or political beliefs;

• binder, enclosing your CV in a binder or folder is not necessary, the binder or folder will simply be discarded so that your CV can be reviewed, sorted and filed with other CVs more easily;

• your sexuality;

• disability or ill health, don't mention issues of this nature unless it is unavoidable;

• negative statements about previous employers, such statements will reflect badly on you;

• criminal convictions, in some countries after a period of time it is not necessary to disclose information about any criminal convictions, if you do not need to do so then don't;

• salary information, you want to get the best possible pay for the qualifications and experience you have, so don't tell a

  prospective employer what you are currently being paid, if they employ you they may only offer you a marginal improvement on

  your current salary which may not reflect your true market worth;

• photo, employers do generally request this, and should not do so because you should be judged on your skills and experience rather than what you look like;

• graphics, adding graphics, borders or patterns to your CV may make it look pretty in your eyes but will probably be an annoying distraction to a recruiter.

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