Are you a 'team player'? Eight Manchester CV clichés to avoid

Looking for a job? Got your CV up to date?

We recently reported on how workers in Manchester are amongst the most unhappy in the population, with 45% of us having considered leaving our jobs within the last three months.

If that's true, then a lot of you are probably working on your CV. Now, a survey carried out by PurpleCV.co.uk suggests that cliché riddled applications are likely to turn prospective employers off. They surveyed over 2,000 people in the UK, broken down by region, to find out which characteristics people would be most likely to use to describe themselves in their resumes.

The top cliché used in Manchester CVs is ‘reliable’, followed by ‘hard working’ - something an employer would hopefully assume you were anyway, otherwise why would they be interviewing you for the job in the first place? Just over 12% of us are that old chestnut, a ‘team player’, which should go without saying, while 11.6% of us describe ourselves as ‘dedicated’ (employers will generally imagine you would be, since they’ll be providing your pay packet). Over 10% of us are ‘passionate’ about our various skills and hobbies and 7.6% of us are supposedly ‘strategic thinkers’ (as opposed to thinking un-strategically, which would of course put prospective employers off). And 4.1% are ‘results driven’, with just under 3% of us, on average, are ‘dynamic’, which is arguably something that can really only be agreed with once you’ve actually started the job.

The top eight Manchester CV clichés 
Reliable: 23.1%
Hard working: 18.4%
Team player: 12.1%
Dedicated: 11.6%
Passionate: 11.0%
Strategic: Thinker: 7.6%
Results Driven: 4.1%
Dynamic: 2.9%

So, what should you say in your CV?

Andrew Arkley from PurpleCV says
'Focus on demonstrating your experience by giving real life examples of your achievements, and don’t forget to tailor it to the actual role you’re applying for. Avoid jargon and corporate speak and you’ll be half way to standing out anyway, purely because you’ve avoided using any clichés!'

So stick that in your CV!

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