The smallest thing on your CV that nobody thinks about

This one takes thirty seconds to fix and almost nobody does it.

Your CV file lands in a folder alongside two hundred others. It gets opened by someone who has never met you, usually between two meetings, usually on a laptop with too many tabs.

The filename is the first thing they see. Before the layout, before the headline, before a single bullet.

cv_final_v7_REALLY_final.pdf tells them something. Not something disqualifying, but something. It says this document has been through seven anxious revisions and the person sending it does not think about how it lands on the other side.

Anna_Petrova_Senior_iOS_Engineer.pdf tells them something else. It says this person thought about the recipient. It is also, incidentally, findable six weeks later when someone searches their downloads folder for your name, which is a real thing that happens when a role reopens.

The pattern: your full name, the level you are targeting, the role. Nothing else. No dates, no version numbers, no company name unless you are tailoring per application, in which case put it at the end.

Why I am spending a whole issue on something this small. Because it is a member of a category, and the category matters.

Your CV contains a set of details nobody grades explicitly and everybody notices. The filename. Whether your email address is professional. Whether your LinkedIn URL is the default one with numbers on the end. Whether the dates on your CV match the dates on your profile, which is the single fastest way to get quietly dropped without ever being told why.

None of these are about how good an engineer you are. All of them are free to fix. And they accumulate: one is nothing, four together produce an impression of carelessness that colours everything read afterwards.

Spend ten minutes on the list. It is the highest ratio of outcome to effort available anywhere in a job search.