Ensure the brightest part of your CV isn't a staple, writes Jim Bright.

Charmaine from Caulfield has sent me her CV to critique. I'll start with a first impression - it is not good.

The accompanying cover letter is a generic delete-as-applicable template - I don't like this approach because it encourages a cookie-cutter, impersonal letter.

Roll up your sleeves and put some commitment into your job search by writing a totally new letter for each role. The letter is littered with phrases in bold. Am I reading a job application or an offer from Readers Digest?

The letter and CV contain some awkward phrasing and misuse of idioms that underline the migrant status of the applicant. A recruiter who stumbles over odd or awkward phraseology is often going to be provoked into doubts about the candidate's suitability for roles in which professional communication is important.

The CV has some odd formatting. Her name and address seem to have been cut and pasted into a text box, some of which was obscured by another text box on top of it. I can't read the email or postal address; this is a total disaster for the applicant. No matter how nice the format looks on your computer, send it to friends to check if the format survives the travels. This means making friends with Mac and PC users to ensure cross-platform compatibility.

Charmaine has chosen a nasty shade of electric blue for her headings - these look a mess and when printed out, they will photocopy poorly - stick to black. She also uses bullet points too much. Bullets are great at providing highlights and a visual relief to paragraphs but they lose their impact when they constitute too much of the page.

Charmaine has the right idea about presenting achievements as well as responsibilities, which is great. However, she can improve what she has written by providing more details of some of the achievements and hence make them more compelling, believable and, most importantly, show how they enhance the fit between her and the role she is applying for.

For instance, she writes: "Saved 40 per cent cost by facilitating change in commission process and making it more efficient" in the context of a finance and sales support analyst role. Now I don't know what she means by "40 per cent cost" - cost of what? What changes did she "facilitate" and how was it more "efficient"?

You cannot go into great detail for all your achievements, so the trick is to pick the four or five that best enhance the fit between you and the role you are applying for and to set out what you did, when, how and what the result was. The oft-used STAR principle can help structure this: situation, task, action and result.

A couple of other bugbears. In listing "computer systems used", we get a bullet-point list including "Ms Outlook and Lotus Notes"; the other bullets are similar in that they give me no sense of the extent of her competence with these programs. On a more carping, trivial note, the generally accepted abbreviation of Microsoft is MS and not "Ms". Does such a trivial thing matter? Well, yes. We found in a study of recruiters that just one typo reduced the chance of being shortlisted by 50 per cent.

Charmaine can improve her CV by telling a more coherent story of how she fits the role. This is a matter of editing to give prominence to the most compelling information and summarising or eliminating the less relevant stuff.

Charmaine's CV is like many I see. It's packed with potentially great material and achievements but I had to search hard to make sense of it and it was left to the reader to make the links between her expertise and the job. It is an opportunity lost to show the recruiter how and why you fit.

Jim Bright is professor of career education and development at ACU and a partner at Bright and Associates, a career-management consultancy. brightside@jimbright.com