Your CV repeats itself, and you are the last person who will notice

What happened when we ran this check on our own pages

This site keeps two kinds of writing side by side: guides, which explain how to write a CV for a particular job, and worked examples, which show one. They cover overlapping ground on purpose. Over three weeks in September we went through several of these pairs properly, comparing them line by line rather than reading each one on its own.

Every pair we opened had the same fault. On the accountant pages, two of the four before-and-after rewrites on the example were word for word identical to the two on the guide. The same two sentences also appeared further down inside the specimen CV, so a reader who scrolled met them three times on one page. Four of the five "common mistakes" restated the guide's mistakes in slightly different words. Three of the five questions at the bottom had near-identical answers.

Nobody had copied anything deliberately. The pages were written months apart by the same person, who had reread both since and noticed nothing, because each page reads perfectly well on its own. What found it was mechanical: putting the two texts next to each other and comparing strings.

The check itself

This takes about fifteen minutes and needs nothing but a plain text editor. The point of every step is to break the reading order, because reading in order is what lets recognition take over.

1. Copy the whole CV into a plain text file — not the PDF, not the formatted document. Formatting is part of what makes repetition invisible, because two identical sentences in different sections look different.
2. Put every bullet point on its own line and sort the lines alphabetically. Near-duplicates start with the same words, so sorting drops them next to each other where they cannot hide.
3. Now read only the first three or four words of each line, ignoring the rest. This is the repetition people miss most: six bullets that all begin "Responsible for" or "Worked with the".
4. List the verb that starts each bullet and count them. Two or three repeats across a whole CV is normal. Five of the same verb means you have one way of describing work and are using it for everything.
5. Read the summary, then immediately read the first two bullets of your current role. If the summary is those bullets compressed, one of them is redundant — and it is usually the summary, because it is the one that should be doing a different job.
6. Search for your own filler. Everyone has three or four phrases they lean on; find yours by reading the sorted list and noticing what you are tired of.

Two different faults, which need different fixes

Repetition and vagueness feel similar on the page and are often confused, but they fail for different reasons and the remedies are opposite.

A repeated sentence is usually true and useful — it is just being said twice, so the second instance costs space and makes the first look less considered. The fix is deletion, and you keep whichever instance sits where a reader will be looking.

A generic claim is a different thing: "excellent communication skills", "results-driven professional", "team player". These are not repeated within your CV; they are repeated across everyone else's. Deleting them is not enough, because the space existed for a reason. Either replace the claim with the thing that would make someone believe it, or accept that you have nothing to put there and let the line go.

Repetition that is fine, and repetition that is not

This check turns blunt if you apply it to everything, so it is worth being clear about what is not a fault.

• A term the advert uses, appearing in your summary and in your experience, is deliberate and correct. Our main guide covers how far to take that; the short version is that matching the employer's vocabulary is fine where it is genuinely your vocabulary too.
• A tool or system named in three roles because you used it in three roles. That is a career history, not a repetition.
• Section headings, obviously. Nobody is counting those.
• The same responsibility appearing in two consecutive roles, if what changed between them is stated — more entities, more autonomy, a different system. If nothing changed, you are describing one job twice and the earlier one can go to a single line.

What to do with what you find

Cut before you rewrite. A rewrite of a redundant sentence produces a better redundant sentence, and it is the more tempting option because it feels like work. Decide first whether the line needs to exist at all.

When two lines make the same point and both need to stay — because they belong to different roles — differentiate them on something concrete rather than on phrasing. Scale, ownership, system, or what went wrong. Rewording alone leaves the reader with the same feeling of having read this already, which is the actual damage.

Then leave it a day and read it once more, out loud. Reading aloud is slow enough that recognition cannot outrun the words, which is why it catches things a silent reread does not.

Why this is worth fifteen minutes

A reader who meets the same claim three times does not think "this is repetitive". They form a vaguer and more damaging impression: that there is less here than the length suggested. Two pages that say one page of things read as a thin candidate, even when the underlying work is not thin at all.

The opposite is also true, and it is the reason to bother. Cutting the duplicates usually frees five or six lines, and those lines are where the things you have never mentioned can go — the awkward project, the system nobody asked you to fix, the year that needs explaining. That material is almost always more interesting than the sentence it replaced.