Small, fixable errors that are quietly costing capable people the interview.

Post a job in Lagos, Abuja, or Port Harcourt today and it is entirely normal for that vacancy to receive thousands of applications within hours. To survive that volume, most Nigerian employers now run every CV through two filters before a human ever properly reads it: an Applicant Tracking System that scores and ranks documents automatically, followed by a manual review that, on average, lasts somewhere between three and six seconds per candidate. In an environment moving that fast, a CV does not need to be dishonest or unqualified to get rejected. It only needs to trip one of a handful of well-known, entirely avoidable errors.

The frustrating part is that most of these errors have nothing to do with a candidate's actual ability to do the job. They are structural, stylistic, and habitual, patterns carried over from outdated formatting norms that simply do not survive contact with modern ATS software or a recruiter's six-second scan. Here are the ten that do the most damage, and exactly how to fix each one.

1. Sending the Same CV to Every Job

The single most common mistake is treating a CV as a one-size-fits-all document, sent to wildly different roles and industries in the hope that volume alone will produce results. It rarely does, and the reason is mechanical, not personal. ATS software scores incoming applications by matching keywords and context against the specific language in the job posting. When a vacancy asks for "Google Analytics (GA4)" or "CBN regulatory compliance" and a CV only says "managed marketing activities" or "handled compliance matters," it simply fails to cross the match threshold, no matter how relevant the underlying experience actually was.

Even on the rare occasion a generic CV slips past the automated filter, it creates friction with the human reader on the other side. A recruiter working through hundreds of applications will not pause to guess how a vague past role connects to their specific vacancy. They will move on to the CV that already spells it out.

The fix: keep a long, detailed master CV containing every project, metric, and skill you've ever built, and treat that as a private reference document, not something you send out. For each application, pull the relevant pieces from it and rewrite your summary and top bullet points to speak directly to that specific posting's language.

2. Describing Duties Instead of Proving Impact

A huge share of Nigerian CVs read like copied job descriptions rather than evidence of performance: "responsible for managing customer service calls," "handled daily sales activity," "assisted in organizing financial records." These sentences confirm that a person held a title. They prove nothing about whether that person was actually good at the job.

Recruiters are trying to predict future performance, and past achievement is the best evidence they have for that. A passive duty list gives them nothing to work with. Compare the difference:

Weak: "Responsible for managing customer service calls and resolving client complaints."

Strong: "Rebuilt customer service escalation workflow, cutting average response time from 14 hours to 47 minutes and lifting Net Promoter Score by 22 points in one quarter."

Weak: "Handled sales and business development for banking products in Lagos."

Strong: "Grew corporate deposit base by ₦50 million within 12 months through structured outreach to over 150 commercial clients, maintaining a 95% retention rate."

The pattern is consistent: action verb, specific context, and a real number wherever one genuinely exists. Numbers do not need to be dramatic to be useful. They just need to be true and specific.

3. Leading With Personal Demographics and a Photo

Many Nigerian CVs still open with a block of personal information: date of birth, marital status, number of children, religion, state of origin, local government area, sometimes a passport photograph, none of which was requested by the employer. This is a habit inherited from older, pre-digital resume conventions, and it now works against candidates in two distinct ways.

First, it creates real legal and reputational exposure for the employer reading it. Multinational firms and regulated financial institutions in particular operate under strict non-discrimination policies, and a CV that voluntarily discloses age, religion, or marital status can put a hiring panel in an awkward position that many will resolve simply by rejecting the document outright. Second, it wastes the most valuable real estate on the entire page, the top third, which should be reserved for a professional summary and core skills, not information a recruiter neither wants nor is legally supposed to be using in the decision. Embedded photographs cause a more mundane but equally damaging problem: they frequently break ATS text parsing entirely, scrambling or deleting nearby data.

The fix: remove age, marital status, religion, state of origin, and photographs entirely, unless an employer has explicitly asked for them. Lead instead with your name, contact details, a professional headline, and a tailored summary.

4. Burying NYSC and SIWES Under "Education" Instead of "Experience"

A surprisingly common and costly error among Nigerian graduates is filing their NYSC service year or SIWES placement under "Education," "Certifications," or a vague label like "Corps Member," rather than treating it as what it actually is: a full year of real professional work.

This misclassification quietly manufactures a work gap that does not exist. A candidate who spent a year working diligently at a Primary Place of Assignment ends up looking, on paper, like someone who did nothing between graduation and their first job search, purely because of where the information was filed.

The fix: move NYSC and SIWES experience directly into the main Work Experience section, paired with a functional title rather than a generic one, "Audit Intern (NYSC)" or "HSE Officer (NYSC)" rather than simply "Corps Member," and describe the actual projects, tools, and outcomes involved, using the same action-verb, outcome-focused approach as any other role.

5. Unprofessional Contact Details and Formatting

Contact information is the first thing a recruiter reads, and it functions as an early, silent proxy for how seriously a candidate takes the application. Email addresses built around old nicknames or casual terms from secondary school, phone numbers missing the international country code, or a full residential address where only a city and state were needed, all of these quietly signal carelessness before a recruiter has read a single line about actual qualifications.

The fix: use a clean, professional email address built from your actual first and last name, always include the +234 country code so the number parses correctly across automated systems and international contacts, and state only your city and state, for example "Ikeja, Lagos State," rather than a full street address.

6. Padding the CV With Dead Weight

Two habits in particular waste space that could otherwise be doing real work for a candidate. The closing line "References available upon request" tells a recruiter nothing they didn't already assume, since most hiring processes now request references formally at the offer stage regardless of whether the line was there. And once a candidate holds a university degree, listing WASSCE or NECO subjects and grades adds no meaningful differentiation, it simply clutters an academic section that should be leading with the higher qualification.

The fix: cut both. Use the reclaimed space for a stronger skills section or an additional achievement bullet instead.

7. Decorative Templates That Break the ATS

Multi-column layouts, graphic skill-rating bars, floating text boxes, and custom icons look impressive to a human eye and cause real damage to a machine one. ATS software reads documents in a simple, linear, left-to-right pattern. A two-column layout gets read straight across both columns at once, merging unrelated text into scrambled, unreadable fragments. A graphic bar showing "80% proficiency in Excel" cannot be interpreted by a text parser at all, and often registers as zero proficiency rather than partial credit. Information placed inside headers, footers, or floating text boxes is frequently skipped entirely, sometimes stripping out contact details or whole sections of work history without the candidate ever knowing it happened.

The fix: use a single-column layout with standard, readable typography, Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman between 10pt and 12pt, and standard section headings like "Professional Summary," "Work Experience," "Education," and "Skills." Save and submit as a properly named file, not something like "My_CV_Draft_Final.pdf."

8. Listing Basic Software as a Core Skill

Naming "Microsoft Word" as a headline technical skill is one of the fastest ways to signal, unintentionally, that a candidate lacks more specialized, higher-value capabilities. Basic word processing is assumed at this point, not a differentiator, and featuring it prominently alongside a vague objective statement like "a passionate, hard-working professional seeking a challenging role in a dynamic company" compounds the problem: neither line tells a recruiter anything concrete about actual expertise.

The fix: replace generic software mentions with the specific, domain-relevant tools and frameworks the role actually requires, and replace the vague objective with a tight, three-line professional summary stating your exact job title, years of experience, primary technical skills, and one or two quantifiable achievements relevant to the role you're applying for.

9. The Wrong Length for Your Career Stage

Document length should track directly with actual professional history, and a mismatch in either direction reads badly. Early-career candidates with under eight years of experience should keep their CV to a single page. Padding it out with excessive spacing, oversized fonts, detailed secondary school descriptions, or long lists of basic coursework in an attempt to look more substantial tends to read as an inability to summarise, exactly the opposite of the impression a candidate is trying to create. On the other end, mid-to-senior professionals with eight or more years of experience should generally extend to two pages, since compressing a genuinely complex career into a single page risks stripping out the leadership accomplishments and metrics that actually justify seniority.

The fix: match your length honestly to your actual career stage. One page for early career, up to two for senior professionals, and use the extra length only for genuinely relevant substance, never filler.

10. Typos, Sloppy Proofreading, and Inflated Claims

Grammatical errors and typos in the early sections of a CV read as carelessness, and in roles that involve client communication, documentation, or analytical reporting, that impression alone is often enough to end an application immediately. Misspelling a job title or a piece of core industry terminology is a particularly damaging version of this, since it suggests unfamiliarity with the very field being applied to.

A more serious version of this problem is outright misrepresentation: inflating a past job title, stretching employment dates to hide a gap, or claiming fluency in a tool never actually used. Background verification has become significantly more common among Nigerian employers, checking academic records, past employment, and NYSC certificates directly with the issuing source. A misrepresentation caught at this stage does not just end the specific application, it can result in a withdrawn offer and, in some cases, placement on shared industry blacklists that follow a candidate to future applications.

The fix: proofread in multiple passes, ideally with a second pair of eyes, and describe your actual experience as accurately and confidently as possible rather than reaching for an inflated version of it. Real experience, described precisely, holds up. Invented experience eventually does not.

Bringing It Together

None of these ten mistakes require a career coach or an expensive rewrite to fix. What they require is treating a CV the way the people screening it actually treat it: as a document that has to survive an automated keyword match before it ever reaches a human being, and then has to hold that human's attention for a matter of seconds once it does. Build one detailed master CV that captures everything you've genuinely done, keep the formatting clean and simple enough for a machine to read it correctly, lead with what actually matters instead of what used to be customary, and describe your real experience in terms of what it achieved rather than what it involved. That combination is what turns a CV from something that quietly disappears into the pile into one that actually earns the next conversation.

This article draws on current recruitment screening practices, Applicant Tracking System behaviour, and Nigeria-specific CV formatting research current as of mid-2026.