Some CV advice is genuinely outdated. Some were never true to begin with and just got repeated so often it started sounding like fact. Recruiters, the people actually on the receiving end of all this, tend to have a quiet, ongoing list of things they wish job seekers would simply stop doing. Here's a good chunk of that list.
"Every CV needs an objective statement"
This one's a fossil from an era when CVs opened with "Objective: To obtain a challenging position in a dynamic organization," a sentence so generic it could sit unchanged on literally anyone's CV, from a fresh graduate to someone twenty years into a career. Recruiters don't need to know that you want a job, that much is obvious from the fact that you sent them a CV. They need a short summary of who you are and what you bring, not a sentence declaring your general interest in being employed.
"One CV should cover every job you apply for"
Sending the exact same document to a bank, a startup, and an NGO is the CV equivalent of wearing the same outfit to a wedding, a funeral, and a job interview because it's "smart casual enough." It technically fits every occasion and is genuinely right for none of them. This doesn't mean rebuilding the whole document from scratch each time, it means adjusting the summary, reordering which experience leads, and making sure the language actually speaks to the specific role rather than to roles in general, which is one of the first things we adjust with a client at Jade Consult once we see a CV that's clearly been mass-sent everywhere without a single tweak.
"A longer CV proves more experience"
More pages was never the same thing as more substance, and a recruiter can tell the difference within about a paragraph. A padded two-page CV listing the same three skills in six different ways reads as less experienced than a tight one-page document that says exactly what it needs to and stops. Length should follow from what you genuinely have to say, not from an anxious instinct to fill space so the page doesn't look empty.
"Every job you've ever had needs to be listed"
Nobody needs to know about the two months you spent doing data entry six years ago if it has nothing to do with where you're headed now. A CV isn't a legal record of your entire employment history, it's a curated argument for why you're right for this specific role. Cutting an irrelevant, ancient role isn't dishonesty, it's editing, the same instinct that makes a good essay better by removing the paragraph that didn't need to be there.
"A creative design makes you stand out"
It makes you stand out, technically, just rarely for the reason you were hoping. A CV with three fonts, a sidebar, and a color scheme that clashes with itself doesn't read as bold or memorable to most recruiters, it reads as a document that prioritized decoration over the actual content underneath it. The CVs that genuinely stand out tend to be clean, easy to scan, and full of specific, well-written accomplishments, standing out through what they say rather than how loudly they say it.
"You need a photo on your CV to look professional"
Here in Ghana, this one's genuinely mixed rather than a clean myth or a clean rule, some local employers still expect a passport photo, plenty of modern companies couldn't care less either way, and it depends heavily on the industry and how the application's being submitted. What's actually mythical is the idea that a photo alone signals professionalism. A blurry, poorly lit, oddly cropped photo does the opposite of what it was meant to do, and if you're not sure whether your target employer expects one, it's a genuinely reasonable thing to just ask, or to check a few of their existing job postings for a pattern.
"Recruiters read every line carefully"
They don't, not on the first pass, and pretending otherwise leads people to bury their strongest material in paragraph four hoping for a patient, thorough reader who mostly doesn't exist. The people actually screening CVs are moving fast, scanning for a handful of specific signals before deciding whether to slow down at all. Write for that reality rather than for the version of a recruiter who has all afternoon and nothing else to read.
Why these myths survive anyway
Most of them started as genuinely reasonable advice at some point, twenty years ago, in a different hiring landscape, and simply never got updated as recruiting itself changed. They get passed from one CV template to the next, one well-meaning relative's advice to another, until they're treated as timeless rules rather than what they actually are, outdated habits nobody's bothered to question. Which is exactly the kind of thing we spend a good chunk of a first session untangling at Jade Consult, since half the work of fixing a CV is simply figuring out which of its problems came from bad advice someone genuinely believed was correct.
— Samuel Nii Adotei Allotey (the_kurios_poet)