You've applied to forty jobs. Maybe sixty. You tailor the cover letter, you triple-check the email address, you hit send... and then nothing. Not even a rejection. Just silence.
The frustrating part is that you assume the problem is experience — that you're competing against people who've already had three internships and a part-time job in the field, and there's nothing you can do about that. But in most cases, the CV itself is quietly working against you, and the fix has nothing to do with experience you don't have yet.
We review CVs from graduates and first-jobbers every week, and the same seven mistakes show up over and over. None of them are hard to fix. All of them are easy to miss when it's your own CV.
1. Leading with a "Career Objective" instead of a summary that sells you
"Motivated recent graduate seeking an entry-level position to develop my skills and grow within a dynamic company." Delete it. This sentence tells a recruiter nothing about you and everything about the fact that you copied a template. An objective statement talks about what you want; a summary talks about what you bring. Replace it with two or three lines: your field, your strongest skill or achievement, and the kind of role you're aiming for. "Marketing graduate with hands-on experience running social campaigns during a six-month internship at [company], looking to bring that into a junior digital marketing role." That's a sentence a recruiter can actually use.
2. Copying your job description instead of showing your impact
Almost every entry-level CV we see lists duties: "Responsible for handling customer inquiries," "Assisted with social media posts," "Helped organize events." These are true, but they say nothing about whether you did them well. Recruiters don't hire duties, they hire results. Ask yourself, for every line: so what happened? Did response times improve? Did the campaign get more engagement than the last one? Did the event run without a hitch when the previous one didn't? Even at internship level, there's almost always a number, a comparison, or an outcome hiding behind the task — you just have to dig for it.
3. Cramming in everything instead of choosing what's relevant
When you don't have much work history, the instinct is to fill the page: every course from university, every hobby, your driving license, the summer you volunteered at a festival five years ago. The result is a CV where the one thing that actually matters — the internship that's directly relevant to the job — is buried under paragraphs of noise. A recruiter spends seconds, not minutes, deciding whether to keep reading. Cut anything that doesn't support the specific job you're applying for. A shorter CV that's all signal beats a longer one that's mostly noise.
4. Choosing a "creative" template over a readable one
Graphic timelines, skill bars, icons, two-tone color blocks — they look nice in a design portfolio and they cause real problems everywhere else. Many are hard for applicant tracking systems to parse correctly, which means your information can arrive at the recruiter's screen scrambled or missing entirely. And even when a human opens it directly, dense graphics slow down the few seconds they're willing to give you. For entry-level roles especially, where you're competing on clarity and judgment as much as on experience, a clean, well-structured CV signals more professionalism than a flashy one does.
5. Filling gaps with buzzwords instead of proof
"Hardworking, team player, fast learner, excellent communication skills." Every single one of these appears on thousands of entry-level CVs, usually with nothing behind them. Recruiters have stopped reading these words — they scan past them looking for evidence. If you're a fast learner, show it: "Learned [software] independently in two weeks and used it to build the department's first shared reporting template." If you're a team player, show where and how. A claim with no evidence is worse than no claim at all, because it makes the rest of the CV feel unverified too.
6. Sending the same CV to every job
It's tempting when you're applying to twenty roles a week to send one version everywhere. But a recruiter hiring for a specific job is scanning for specific signals, and a generic CV rarely has them front and center. You don't need to rewrite the whole thing each time — just reorder your bullet points so the most relevant ones are at the top, adjust your summary line to match the role, and mirror a few key terms from the job posting itself. Fifteen minutes of tailoring per application will outperform a hundred identical CVs sent on autopilot.
7. Typos, inconsistent formatting, and an unprofessional email address
This is the mistake that costs the most for the least reason. A CV with a typo in the company name, dates that don't line up, three different fonts, or an email address like "partyboy_1998@..." tells a recruiter you either didn't check your work or don't think it matters. For an entry-level candidate, attention to detail is one of the only things you can prove without needing any experience for it — so getting it wrong here is disproportionately expensive. Read your CV out loud, check every date twice, and use a plain firstname.lastname email address.
The honest fix: get a second pair of eyes on it
Here's the uncomfortable truth: you can't fully proofread your own CV, because you already know what you meant to say. That's exactly why a second opinion matters more at entry level than at any other career stage — you don't yet have the experience to override a weak CV, so the CV has to do all the work.
That's what our free CV review is for. Send it over and a human reviewer — not a bot — will tell you plainly which of these seven mistakes is holding your CV back, and what to fix first. No cost, no catch, and no obligation to buy anything afterward. If you want it rewritten properly rather than just diagnosed, our CV Starter package is built for exactly this stage of career, and you can see how it compares to our other packages on the services page.
You're not failing because you lack experience. You're failing because your CV isn't telling the story you actually have. Fix that, and the silence usually breaks.