No matter how much you try, its always difficult to make your CV standout from the pack. There is hardly any secret that remains untold about how your resume should be. However, since it still remains the only opportunity to make a good impression with a prospective employer, it is therefore advisable to invest some time and read advice related to making the best possible resume. Beyond neat formatting and some necessary inclusions like professional achievements and summary there are some things that you need to stop including to have the best possible chances of scoring an interview.

Some people take their resume too seriously including things that are not required. A CV is a branding document and not a legal document of any sorts. Here are six things that need not show in your resume. Leaving them out of your CV won’t have any detrimental effect on your job application.

Objective
There was a time when an objective was considered a compulsory part of the resume; not anymore. In fact, the evolution of CV from its early days has rendered many of its components useless and outdated and objective is one of them. While no hiring manager is going to send you to jail for including one, you will definitely lose some of your coolness because it is you are stating the obvious and wasting important space that could be used for something more important.

Personal Information
No hiring manager is interested in how many girlfriends you have or what religion do you follow. Including things like date of birth, ethnicity, religious inclinations is totally prohibited as it puts the hiring manager in a dangerous position. These are strictly personal information and in some countries there are laws that companies cannot ask them while recruiting candidates as this would amount to discrimination on based of a person’s color, caste or religion.

Every job that you had
There might have been really tough times when you had to work as a bartender to clear the bills. Does that mean your job application for a teacher’s job should include this as “work experience”? Of course not! You have the liberty to pick and choose jobs to include in your resume. Even if you took a wrong job and had to make a quick exit, you are free to leave it out. If there is a considerable gap, try to fill it with anything work-related such as a diploma course or independent consulting.

Hobbies
Who cares if you love scuba diving or are a video game buff? Certainly not your prospective employer who will pay you 50k bucks for analyzing, assessing and formulating a competitive brand strategy. Including hobbies, irrelevant to your work render an unprofessional appeal to your CV. If it’s not relevant to the work you are applying for, then it’s simply a waste of space and a waste of the recruiter’s time as well. Therefore, don’t include irrelevant hobbies on your resume.

Every task and responsibility at your each job
Suppose you had five job changes in the past and this is the sixth one that you are applying for. Assuming that each job had at least five responsibilities for you, five job changes make it 20 responsibilities in total which would require at least 3 pages of just your work history. Who has the time to read all that? Nearly every experienced recruiter can extrapolate the roles and responsibilities of candidate from his job title. Neither does telling tasks and responsibilities does give any insight into how well did he or she performed them in their previous organizations.

Instead, tell your prospective employer what you have done that makes you special. Include the challenges that you faced in your previous roles and how you overcame them. How did your company benefit from your creativity?

References
References are considered more of filler than a significant addition to your CV. If your employer really needs any reference, he or she will definitely ask you during the interview process. By including references at the end of the document, you might be just wasting some precious space.

In addition to these significant exclusions, your resume shouldn’t include personal pronouns and words like I, me, my. Writing on the CV in third and first person is not recommended by experts. You also do not need to include any photo, until or unless the employer specifically asked for it or the job depends on how well you look.