How to Proofread Your Own CV

Surveys of UK recruiters put spelling and grammar errors at or near the top of the list of things that get a CV rejected. Not because a typo proves anything about your ability, but because a document you had unlimited time to check is treated as the best work you are willing to submit.

The difficulty is that proofreading your own writing is genuinely hard. Your brain knows what the sentence is supposed to say, so it shows you that version instead of the one on the page. Beating that requires technique, not effort.

Leave It Overnight

The single most effective thing you can do is stop. Finish the CV, close it, and do not look at it again until the next day.

Familiarity is what blinds you. After a day away, you read the words that are actually there rather than the ones you meant. Almost everyone who does this finds at least one error they had read past a dozen times.

If you genuinely cannot wait a day, wait an hour and do something unrelated in between. It is not as good, but it is far better than proofreading immediately after writing.

Read It Backwards

Start at the last line and work up to the top, one line at a time.

This breaks the flow of meaning, which is what stops you skimming. You are no longer following an argument, so your attention lands on the words themselves. It is slow and it feels odd, and it catches things nothing else does.

A variation for spelling specifically is to read backwards word by word. Tedious for a whole document, but excellent for a section you have rewritten several times, because heavily edited passages are where duplicated and half deleted words hide.

Read It Out Loud

Say every word aloud, including the bullet points. Your ear catches problems your eye misses: a sentence that runs out of breath, a tense that slips, a missing word, a phrase you have used three times already.

Anywhere you stumble is a place a reader will stumble. You do not always need to know why it is wrong, just mark it and come back.

This is also the fastest way to find repetition. If you hear yourself say “responsible for” four times, that is a rewriting job, and our guide on the best action words for your CV has plenty of replacements.

Change How It Looks

Your brain memorises the shape of a page. Change the shape and it has to look again.

Print it. Change the font. Change the font size. Put it on a different device. Any of these disrupts the pattern recognition that lets you skim.

Printing is the strongest version, and it has a second benefit: you see the document as the reader might, with page breaks in real places and margins that either work or do not.

Check the Things Spellcheck Cannot

Spellcheck finds words that do not exist. It has nothing to say about words that exist but are wrong, and those are the ones that embarrass you.

Go through deliberately looking for:

• Their, there and they’re. Your and you’re. Its and it’s.
• Manager and manger. Public and pubic. Form and from. All real words, all common CV errors.
• Company names and job titles, spelled and capitalised as the organisation does it.
• Dates that overlap, run backwards, or leave an unexplained gap.
• Phone number and email address, checked digit by digit and character by character.
• Consistency in your own formatting: full stops at the end of bullets or not, but the same throughout.

The contact details deserve a specific mention. A CV with a wrong digit in the phone number is a CV that cannot be acted on, and it happens more often than anyone would like to believe.

Check Against the Advert

Proofreading is not only about errors. It is also the point where you verify that the document does what it is meant to do.

Put the job advert next to the CV. Every essential requirement in the advert should be findable in the CV, and ideally on the first page. If something they have asked for is not there, that is a bigger problem than any typo.

This is also where you catch the tailoring mistakes. A CV rewritten for one employer that still names another one somewhere in the personal statement is a rejection, and it is entirely avoidable with one targeted pass.

Get Somebody Else to Read It

After all of the above, hand it to another person. Not for their opinion on your career, just to read it.

A fresh reader finds things you cannot, because they have no memory of the intended sentence. Ask them to tell you what job they think you are applying for and what you are best at. If their answers are not what you intended, the problem is not proofreading, it is the writing underneath.

Two readers is better than one, and one of them should ideally be someone who does not know your industry, because they will notice jargon that has stopped meaning anything to you. If neither reader can tell you what is strongest about you, the problem is in the content, and our guide on what to avoid when writing a CV covers the usual causes.

Use Tools, But Do Not Trust Them

Spellcheck and grammar tools are worth running, and they are not a proofread.

They miss context errors entirely, they are frequently wrong about UK English, and they will happily suggest changes that damage a sentence. The American spelling problem is the most common one: a tool set to US English will quietly flag organised, specialised, programme and licence as errors, and accepting those suggestions puts American spellings through a CV going to a British employer.

Check your language setting before you start, and treat every suggestion as a question rather than an instruction.

Text-to-speech is the tool that genuinely helps. Having your device read the CV aloud catches missing and duplicated words far better than reading it yourself, because the software reads exactly what is on the page with none of your knowledge of what it should say.

Check the Formatting as Well as the Words

Proofreading is not only about language. A surprising number of CVs go out with visible formatting faults that are just as noticeable as a typo.

Look specifically for:

• Bullet points that do not line up, or that use two different symbols.
• Inconsistent date formats. Pick one, such as Mar 2021 to Aug 2024, and use it everywhere.
• A job title in bold on one entry and not on the next.
• Different font sizes in the same section, usually from pasted text.
• A single line stranded at the top of page two.
• Hyperlinks that are still blue and underlined in some places and not others.

The quickest way to catch pasted formatting is to select the whole document and check that the font and size boxes show one value rather than blank.

Do It Again Before Every Application

A CV you have tailored is a CV you have edited, and edited documents are where errors breed. Half a sentence left behind, a company name not updated, a bullet moved but not re-punctuated.

You do not need the full routine every time. Read the sections you changed out loud, check the employer name appears correctly everywhere it appears at all, and confirm the file name matches the job. Five minutes, every time, before it goes.