Proofreading your CV: typos, consistency, readability

A recruiter who spots a mistake no longer reads your CV the same way: they wonder what else you might let slip in an email to a client. An ATS robot simply fails to recognise a misspelt keyword. Our “Spelling” criterion sums it up: “A typo in a keyword stops it from being recognised, and it puts recruiters off.” Here is the checklist to run before every application, the methods for seeing what you no longer see, and what the site's AI does when you ask it to proofread.

Why you no longer see your own mistakes

You know your CV by heart: your brain reads what you meant to write, not what is on the page. The mistakes that survive are rarely the ones your word processor underlines. They are words that sound alike (“their” and “there”, “affect” and “effect”), agreement across a long sentence, an extra letter in a proper noun, a date copied from an old version. Hence two rules: proofread with methods that break the habit, and follow a list rather than your memory.

The checklist, item by item

1. Spelling and agreement: verb forms, plurals, apostrophes (“its” and “it's”). Tool names and the keywords of your trade are written exactly as in the job ad: “Salesforce”, “PowerPoint”, “SAP”.
2. Verb tenses: one form per block. Past tense for jobs you have left, present tense for your current one, but never a mix within the same job. The detail is in our guide to action verbs.
3. Dates: the same format throughout, newest first, no unexplained overlap, your current job marked “to date” or “present”, and the same dates as on your LinkedIn profile. Our “Readable dates” criterion explains why: “Month and year for each job: the robot works out your experience from the dates.”
4. Consistent titles: the CV headline, the profile and your latest job tell the same story; the names of companies, schools and cities are written the way they write them themselves.
5. Acronyms: each one spelled out once. “Write the acronym and its full form once: the robot may search for either.”
6. Punctuation and typography: bullet points either all with or all without a full stop; no space before a colon or a question mark in English, unlike in French; the same dashes from start to finish; no double spaces.
7. Contact details: every digit of your phone number checked (call yourself), your email address tested (send yourself a message), and a plain address, first name and surname rather than a teenage nickname.
8. Links: LinkedIn, portfolio, code repository. Clickable in the PDF, up to date, public. Open them from the exported file, not from your editor.
9. File name: “CV-Firstname-Lastname.pdf” rather than “CV final FINAL (copy).pdf”. Choosing the format is covered in our guide Word or PDF CV.
10. Readability: every line makes sense without in-house jargon, overlong sentences are split, and the spacing is even. A gap that stands out can be fixed on Fix the spacing.

Methods for catching what slips past you

• Read it aloud: you hear the repeated words, the clumsy sentences and the agreements that sound wrong.
• Read it backwards, from the last line to the first: the meaning disappears and only the words remain. It is the best way to hunt down spelling mistakes.
• Take a break: a night between writing and proofreading beats three rereads on the same evening.
• Change the medium: print your CV, or read it on your phone. A different display breaks the eye's habits.
• One thing at a time: one pass for spelling, one for dates, one for layout. Nobody sees everything at once.
• A second reader, ideally from outside your field: if they stumble over a line, a busy recruiter will too.

What the site's AI proofreading does

From the analysis onwards, the “Fixes” tab quotes up to 10 sentences from your CV and proposes a corrected version of each, with the reason, in four families: ATS robots, value, clarity, spelling. The code checks that every quoted sentence really is in your CV, and replaces with “[X]” any figure your CV does not contain. The details are on Word-for-word fixes.

For a full proofread, go to Have your CV proofread by AI: under “Improved CV”, open “My structure”, then “Have the AI proofread it”. The instruction is fixed: fix spelling, grammar and typing mistakes, make dates, punctuation and heading case consistent, without inventing anything, removing anything or changing the meaning. The proofread CV is redrawn; you compare, touch it up by hand and download it. To fix the mistakes in your PDF exactly as it is, write “fix the mistakes” in “Same layout”: each sentence is rewritten in place.

What it does not do: it knows neither your company nor your trade, so a misspelt client name, an in-house acronym or a wrong but correctly spelt figure goes through untouched. Nor does it judge whether your lines sell your experience well: that is the job of the “value” corrections and of our guide to raising your CV's value. The final read is still yours.

The costliest mistakes

• Wrong contact details: nobody can call you back, and you will never know.
• A misspelt keyword: a recruiter filtering on “Salesforce” will not find “Salesforse”.
• Inconsistent dates: two jobs that overlap with no explanation, or a CV that contradicts LinkedIn, cast doubt on everything else.
• Another company's name in the profile of a CV tailored in a hurry: the most visible mistake there is.
• Leftovers: comments or tracked changes in a Word file, a “to be completed” line, hidden text.

Three lines before and after proofreading:

Once the CV is clean, the next step is keeping it up to date without letting mistakes back in: our guide to updating your CV gives the method.