The risk of highlighting what should not be in the CV

From our experience, many candidates use excessive underlining and highlighting, exceeding the limit from which point reading the text becomes difficult and is simply annoying to look at. That is why we recommend blue-collar candidates and potential candidates in general, to avoid highlighting their CV too much and keep it short in one page. Those resumes, which have too many underlines and highlights often, point out what we should not find out initially about our candidates.

As a recruiting agency for international companies, we understand that candidates try to emphasize in their CV what we think is more important for our business partners. But, there is often a very big difference between what the candidate thinks is important and what our professional consultants think it should be important. 

Moreover, we don’t advise our potential candidates to highlight something that our consultants find as a minor achievement, and instead we recommend them be clear about their limited work experience. In most cases, highlights and underlined text are a source of unexpected information for analysis. And in most cases, the vast majority of the conclusions are exactly the opposite of what the candidates want.

In order to be effective, to really stand out and produce the desired effect, underlining must be extremely rare on a CV. Especially since the formatting and decoration of the content is done with the same highlighting tools: section titles, paragraphs, etc., which considerably increase the number of highlights. Our specialists, who deal with the CVs say that the candidate wants the text to be read. And we understand this but it is good to limit to the maximum the typos and tools of underlining and highlighting the CV. And, above all, we recommend candidates to not overlap highlights! We can’t help but wonder what it would have been like in a candidate’s mind when they wrote down their CV.

Through leadership development and business mobilization, Geologic HR is building innovative strategies and online campaigns to recruit the best temporary workers.  If you are a blue-collar candidate without experience or with no previous skills, do not worry. We recruit for railway sector and in case you have any questions on how we can help you, do not hesitate to write us at or give us a call.