The 15 Minute Check Before You Send Your CV

Most advice about CV errors tells you what is wrong. This is different: it is the procedure you run in the last fifteen minutes, after the writing is finished and before you press send.

The distinction matters because the errors that survive to the final version are not the ones you do not know about. They are the ones your eyes slide over. You wrote the sentence, so you read what you meant rather than what is on the page. You changed the job title in three places and missed the fourth. You exported the file and never opened the export. None of that is a knowledge problem, it is a process problem, and it needs a process to fix.

Run these in order. The order matters, because each pass catches a different class of error and doing them at once means catching none of them.

Pass 1: the leftover from last time, 60 seconds

Do this one first because it is the most damaging and the fastest to check.

If you tailored this CV from a previous application, something from that application is probably still in it. Search the document for the previous company name. Then search for the previous job title. Then read your summary line and your first bullet, which is where a stale sentence most often survives.

An application that names the wrong company does not get a second look. It is not read as a typo, it is read as evidence that you sent the same document to twenty places, which is often true but should not be visible.

Concretely, use the find function rather than your eyes: press ctrl and F, type the old company name, confirm zero results. Do the same in the cover letter, where this error is far more common because the letter names the company by design.

Pass 2: read it backwards, 3 minutes

Start with the last bullet of the last job and read upward, one line at a time.

This feels strange and it works for a specific reason: reading in order lets your brain predict the next words, and prediction is exactly what hides typos. Breaking the sequence forces you to look at each line as an object rather than as part of a narrative.

You are looking for one class of thing here: mechanical errors. Doubled words, missing prepositions, a bullet that starts with a past tense verb in a job you currently hold, inconsistent punctuation at the end of bullets, a stray capital letter mid sentence.

Do not fix content in this pass. If you spot something you want to rewrite, note it and keep going. Mixing proofreading with editing is how both get done badly.

Pass 3: the number and date audit, 2 minutes

This is the pass almost nobody does and it catches errors that cause real damage.

Check that dates are arithmetically possible. A role listed as 2022 to 2021. A gap you did not intend to create because you changed a start date. Two jobs overlapping when they should not, or not overlapping when they should.

Check that dates are consistent in format. March 2024 in one entry, 03/2024 in another, Mar 2024 in a third. Nobody thinks less of you for the inconsistency alone, but it signals the document was assembled rather than written.

Check every number you claim. Percentages, headcounts, budgets, timeframes. Not because someone will audit you, but because you will be asked about at least one of them and you need to be able to explain where it came from. If you cannot reconstruct a number, either work out the real one or remove it.

Check that your totals make sense together. If your summary says twelve years of experience and your timeline covers nine, one of them is wrong. This specific mismatch is common after people update a summary but not the history under it.

Pass 4: export it and open the export, 2 minutes

The single most underrated check. You are not looking at your document, you are looking at what the employer will look at.

Export to the format you are going to send, then close the source file and open the exported one. Then check:

Does the layout hold? Page breaks in the wrong place, a heading orphaned at the bottom of page one, a bullet split across pages.

Do the fonts render? If you used something unusual and it did not embed, the export will show it.

Do the links work? Click every one. A LinkedIn link with a typo, a portfolio link pointing at a local file, a mailto that lost a letter. These break silently and you will never be told.

Can you select the text? Click and drag across your name and your job titles. If nothing highlights, your CV is an image rather than text, which is the most severe of the formatting problems that break parsing. If text inside a header or a text box will not select, that content may not be read either.

The file format decision itself is covered in PDF or Word; this pass is about verifying that whatever you chose actually came out right.

Pass 5: the ten second scan, 1 minute

Put the exported file on screen, look away, look back, and give it exactly ten seconds. Then say out loud what you learned.

If the answer is your name, your current role and roughly what you do, the top of the document is working. If you had to hunt, the reader will not hunt.

Three things to verify specifically:

Is your most relevant experience above the fold? The first third of page one carries most of the decision.

Is the visual hierarchy clear? Job titles should be more prominent than company names or dates unless the companies are the selling point. If everything is the same weight, nothing is emphasised. There is more on this in CV fonts and layout.

Is there anything visually distracting? A stray line, uneven spacing between sections, one bullet indented differently from the rest. These are invisible while you write and obvious to a fresh eye.

Pass 6: the match check, 3 minutes

Open the job ad next to the CV. Not to add keywords, but to answer one question: if someone scored this CV against this ad, would they find the evidence?

Take the three or four requirements the ad emphasises and, for each one, point at the exact line in your CV that answers it. If you cannot point at a line, either the evidence is missing or it is buried too low.

This is the quick version of tailoring your CV to the job description, used as a verification step rather than a writing step. It is also the pass most likely to make you change something substantive, which is why it comes near the end: by now the document is otherwise finished.

Pass 7: everything that is not the CV, 2 minutes

Applications fail outside the document more often than people realise.

The file name. "CV.pdf" and "Untitled 1.pdf" both look careless, and if your name is not in the file name, your document is unfindable in a folder of two hundred. Use "Firstname Lastname CV.pdf". Add the role name if you like, but never leave the name of the previous role in it.

The attachment is actually attached. Check before sending, not after. If you send the email without the file, send the correction immediately and without a long apology.

The email itself. A subject line naming the role, three sentences, your name. An email that says only "please find attached my CV" is a missed opportunity, and one that reproduces the entire cover letter is too much.

The portal fields match the document. If you also typed your history into a form, the dates and titles in the form must match the CV exactly. Mismatches between the two are noticed, and they raise a question you do not want raised.

Your contact details are correct and current. Phone number, email, city. Read the digits of your phone number individually. This is the error with the highest cost and the lowest probability, and the check takes eight seconds. What belongs in that block is covered in personal details on a CV.

The errors a spell checker will never find

Spell check has quietly changed what CV errors look like. Misspelled words are now rare; wrong words that are spelled correctly are everywhere, and they are invisible to software.

Real word substitutions. Manager for manger, from for form, lead for led, their for there, form for from. Every one passes the checker. The backwards read in pass 2 is the only reliable way to catch them.

Tense drift. Past tense in your current role, present tense in an old one. This happens because people duplicate a bullet from one job to another and forget the verb.

Autocorrect damage. A company or product name that got helpfully corrected into a dictionary word. Check every proper noun on the page: company names, product names, tool names, your own surname if it is unusual. Software has changed all of these for people before.

Words that inflated themselves during editing. "Spearheaded", "orchestrated", "leveraged". These often arrive during a late rewrite when you are trying to sound stronger, and they usually make the sentence weaker and harder to defend. If a plainer verb is true, use the plainer verb.

Copied formatting from a job ad. If you pasted a phrase from the posting to make sure you matched it, it may have arrived with different font, size or colour. It is invisible on screen at a glance and obvious in the export.

If you are writing in a second language

An additional pass is worth it, and it is not the one people expect. Grammar is rarely what gives a CV away; register is.

The specific risk is that phrases translated directly from your first language are grammatically fine and land wrong. Formal closings that sound antique, a self description that is more effusive than the target market expects, or the opposite, a tone so modest it reads as a lack of confidence.

The practical fix is comparison rather than correction: find two or three real job ads written by employers in that market and read them next to your CV. You are matching how they write about work, not copying their words. If something in yours sounds notably more elaborate than anything in theirs, simplify it.

The checks worth doing once, not every time

Some things only need verifying when they change, but they need verifying properly at least once.

Your voicemail and your email display name. If your outgoing address shows a nickname or an old surname, fix it once.

Your public profiles. A recruiter who reads your CV will look you up. The dates on your public profile should not contradict the dates on your CV.

Whether your PDF exposes anything you did not intend. Document properties can carry the original author name and, in some cases, the file path it was created in. If you built the CV from a template someone sent you, the author field may still be theirs.

The version you actually keep. Keep one master file, and export tailored versions from it. The most common cause of a wrong-company error is a folder with nine near-identical files and no way to tell which is current.

What a second reader catches that you cannot

Even a perfect process has a limit: you know what the document is supposed to say.

If you can, hand it to someone with no connection to your field and ask them two questions. First, what do you think this person does? Second, what stands out? You are not asking them to proofread. You are testing whether the document communicates without context, and a reader outside your field is a good proxy for a recruiter reading fast.

If nobody is available, leave it overnight. Twelve hours is enough for the sentences to stop being yours, and you will find things you looked straight at yesterday.

A note on what not to do in the last fifteen minutes

Do not restructure. Do not add a new section. Do not decide the summary needs rewriting.

Late changes are where errors enter, because they skip every pass you already ran. If a change is genuinely necessary, make it and then run passes 2, 4 and 5 again on the changed section. If it is not necessary, write it down for the next version and send this one.

The same applies to length. If you discover at the last minute that you are three lines onto a second page, do not solve it by shrinking the font to 9pt and the margins to nothing. Cut three lines instead. The rules are in how long a CV should be.

The compressed version

If you have five minutes rather than fifteen, do these four:

1. Search for the previous company name and job title 2. Export, open the export, click every link, select the text 3. Ten second scan of the top third 4. Check the file name, the attachment and your phone number

Those four catch the errors that actually cost applications. Everything else in this article improves the document; those four stop it from being discarded for a reason that has nothing to do with your ability. The content mistakes are a separate subject and are covered in common CV mistakes, but no amount of good content survives an application addressed to the wrong company.