So, you completed your university finals this June. Since then you’ve had a well-earned break, perhaps with a bit of travelling or part-time work thrown into the bargain. But now summer is coming to an end; it’s time to get one of those job things. A proper graduate one at that. But your efforts to date haven’t proved too successful, and now you’re worried that you’re destined to join the legions of other unemployed graduates, victims one and all of the current recession. But could it be that the problem is in fact that your graduate CV is not up to scratch?

You certainly wouldn’t be the first person fresh out of uni whose graduate CV was selling them short and therefore preventing them from getting a graduate job. Employers are used to–and tired of–wading through piles of CVs from young graduates and final-year students who are in fact highly capable but whose graduate CV is a total mess, littered with mistakes and full of irrelevant information or ridiculous claims.

Making sure your graduate CV doesn’t end up on the rejection pile by avoiding these all-too-common mistakes.

1: Making an overly long graduate CV that is full of irrelevant information

When you’re making the step up to applying for graduate jobs, it’s tempting to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the graduate CV. You want to use every possible fragment of evidence from your past to demonstrate the breadth and depth of your skillset. The end result that you produce: a fifteen-page graduate CV that includes such gems as your participation in a Year 8 student council meeting and the seminal experience of a school trip to Germany when you were thirteen.

An employer’s response to this magnum opus when it lands on their disk: sweeping it into the bin.

Employers just don’t have the time or inclination to read through such lengthy CVs for graduate recruitment. The rule of thumb is that your CV gets longer as you gain more professional experience, with an upper limit of about four pages for people going for the most senior positions (unless the industry they work in plays by a different code). Everyone knows that, realistically, a person in their early twenties–or even in their thirties, for that matter–does not have enough experiences that can relate directly to the professional world to fill more than a couple of pages of A4.

2: Using the CV you’ve used in the past to apply for part-time/casual work as a graduate CV

This is the opposite mistake to writing an overly long graduate CV. Here our graduate just assumes that all CVs are roughly the same, and so sticks with what got them a shelf-stacking position when they were seventeen.

However, the demands of a graduate job are entirely different to this sort of work, and a good graduate CV will reflect this. It will focus on skills like problem solving, critical thinking, leadership and presentation skills, and also contain some sort of statement of career ambitions, rather than simply providing a list of previous employment and qualifications.

3): Not formatting and checking through your graduate CV properly

Many people see gathering together the information required to make a graduate CV as the final thing the final thing they have to do before they send of their job application. What they don’t realise is that all the work they’ve put into working out the best keywords to go with each piece of their employment history or the parts of their degree to emphasise goes to waste if what they send off to employers is visually speaking a disorganised mess that is also full of typos. So take the time to experiment with different layout options, and make sure you proofread everything thoroughly.