Every job application is an assault course of traps for the unwitting. From dodgy CVs to trip-wire personal questions, there’s a seemingly infinite number of ways to see your precious covering letter heading straight for the bin. We asked recruiters to name applications that stood out for all the wrong reasons.

Apply for the wrong job. A botched cut-and-paste job is a sure way to embarrass yourself, says Kirsty MacCulloch, senior project manager at GTI Solutions, a graduate recruitment business. “One candidate applied for a role in financial services explaining exactly why sales and marketing was the career for her,” she says. Another sent in an application stating in detail why they wanted to work for the company’s main competitor. Oops.

Pretend to know the CEO. “Name dropping can go very badly wrong,” says Madalyn Brooks, the HR director at Procter & Gamble. “One candidate had been to hear our chief executive speak and made it sound like an intimate one-on-one conversation.” But the chief executive had no recollection of the encounter. Another tried to sidestep the recruitment process by writing directly to the chief executive asking for a job, Brooks says. “It doesn’t impress anybody.”

Forget to proofread. Dan Hawes, a co-founder of the Graduate Recruitment Bureau, a recruitment site, says: “Our address is Clifton Hill. Someone once wrote in saying ‘Dear Clifton Hill’. “It shows that they haven’t done even the most basic research.” Don’t rely on spellcheck, either. James Whitworth, a team leader at Hydrogen Group, a recruitment consultancy, remembers a covering letter that finished “Breast regards,” while another candidate claimed to have worked in “a very busty office”. “I’m still wondering what kind of office it was,” he says.

Include irrelevant information. “I’m the best left-handed basketball player in Algeria,” wrote one applicant on his CV. “Slightly baffling,” Hawes says. Sarah Shillingford, the graduate recruitment partner at Deloitte, once received an 11-page CV – from a 23-year-old. “[She] told me her whole life history, but hadn’t told it very succinctly.” Sharron Depear, a careers information co-ordinator at City University, London, received a CV that included nursery under education. “Education you had when you were less than four years old is irrelevant,” she says.

Exaggerate. Graham Ruddick, the managing director of Gaapweb, had one candidate who claimed to have done affiliate digital marketing for eBay. “It later emerged that she had sold stuff on eBay.” Another CV was entirely fabricated. When confronted, the candidate didn’t even flinch, saying, “I used to work as an actress and we lied all the time on our CVs.”

Think that you can fool the recruiter. Shillingford says: “One person submitted an application form and was rejected. He applied again, but switched his first and second name round.” Sadly for him, Deloitte checks for duplicate applications and an alert was thrown up on the system. “In the IT world, CVs get passed from one company to another,” Ruddick says. He was rather surprised to receive a passed-on CV from a former junior employee who had previously been dismissed from the firm – claiming to have done his job.

Mistake a job offer for a prank. “I phoned an applicant and said ‘It’s Dan Hawes here, I’d like to talk to you about a job’. She thought it was a wind-up. I said ‘no, no – I’ve got your CV in front of me and you’re suitable for a job’. She said ‘stop taking the ...’ I spent 20 minutes trying to convince her but she still thought it was someone playing a trick so I just left it.”

Ask the recruiter to write your application. “At a recruitment event someone came up to me with a notebook, saying ‘I’m filling in the application, what shall I say?’ expecting me to dictate it to them. That falls into the ‘nice try’ category,” Shillingford says. She also sees examples of ‘text speak’ on CVs, people who can’t spell the company name and several who put “not applicable” to the question “Explain why you have applied for this role.”

Lose sight of what’s appropriate. “A candidate wrote in saying, ‘Some bird from your office e-mailed me about this job’,” Hawes says. But unconventionality can also pay off. Ruddick saw one candidate who sent her application via a singing telegram. “It was for a job at a marketing agency, so she got away with it,” he says.

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