Of all the rules, conventions and regulations of office life, the most annoying surely must be the one that means it is impossible to stand next to a functioning photocopier or printer for longer than 84 seconds without some wag coming up and making a remark about job applications or asking: “Preparing your CV?” Although, when this happened to me the other day, I didn’t mind as much as usual because I was preparing my CV.

No need to begin arranging leaving celebrations. I simply decided to compile a CV for the first time in more than a decade because, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, several readers have sent me copies of their résumés (maybe they think I have some kind of influence, or perhaps it is just a sign of the desperation out there) and they were such a mess that I began wondering what it is about CV-compiling that is so difficult.

It turns out that everything about CV-compiling is difficult. There may be more advice available on the subject online than pictures of Paris Hilton naked, but there wasn’t a single aspect of the task that was not in some way challenging, not least the question of whether you should mention your date of birth and/or sex and/or marital status, given that age and sex discrimination are illegal.

Research has found that a third of people wouldn’t mention their children on a CV and 15 per cent say they wouldn’t cite their age. But do you risk coming across as difficult and paranoid if you don’t do so?

Then there’s the question of the personal statement. Personally, I hate the things: they are rarely more than a collection of bland, nauseating platitudes and clichés, which recruiters see all the time, and are about as revealing as your shoe size. No wonder the director of admissions at Cambridge has admitted that tutors at his university do not assign any marks to students’ essays on why they chose the subject they are applying for.

However, last week I learnt that companies, besieged by job applications, are increasingly using electronic scanning tools to automatically search CVs for certain phrases, so it may be that if you write a personal statement containing buzzwords such as “problem-solving and decision-making”, “oral and written communications”, “teamworking”, “leadership”, “project management”, “dynamic”, “driven” and “enterprising”, you have a better chance of getting your foot in the door.

There’s also the tricky question of photos (most recruiters say they’re unnecessary, but research shows that attractive people have a better chance of being recruited than the ugly, so if you’re hot, why not make the most of it?) and hobbies (no employer really cares that your interests include “going to the pub”, “eating” and “watching Friends”, but then the gap between work and leisure is blurring and so if you have, say, managed to run the New York marathon in an hour, it surely demonstrates certain admirable skills worth mentioning).

And if all this were not enough, there remains the challenge of actually remembering your achievements, a problem sometimes referred to as “achievement amnesia” and the reason that recruitment experts recommend updating your CV regularly. Initially, I struggled with this amnesia more than anything else, maybe in part because there haven’t been many achievements as such in the past decade.

But, slowly, it became evident that such amnesia is probably a good thing, because, let’s face it, if you can’t remember an achievement, it probably isn’t worth remembering, let alone worth including in a CV, which in turn means you are less likely to fill your résumé with inconsequential nonsense and commit the No 1 crime of CV writing: excessive length.

The fact is that there is no one on this planet, up to and including Neil Armstrong, whose achievements could not be boiled down to one side of A4, although the paradox here, to judge from the CVs I have seen recently, is that the less successful you are, the harder you find it to digest your achievements.

Once you’ve, say, walked on the Moon or become President of the United States or written Harry Potter, the urge to mention that you were litter monitor for an entire term at Woden Juniors in 1987 doesn’t feel so strong.

Indeed, I would extend this point and say that brevity is the key rule of CV-writing, the only maxim really worth remembering when embarking on the enterprise, encompassing, as it does, the necessity of (a) not waffling; (b) not writing “curriculum vitae” in large letters at the top of the sheet of paper, because it’s obvious a CV is a CV and you might misspell “curriculum vitae” while you’re at it; (c) avoiding negativity; (d) not framing your CV with squiggly red lines and heart shapes (unless you are going for a job on a teenage girls magazine); (e) not banging on about your gap year in Australia on the pretence that it helped you to develop as a human being when we all know that you actually spent a year getting smashed, stoned and laid; (f) not taking a match to the edges of your CV and proclaiming in a note: “As you can tell from the singe marks, I’m hot property”; (g) not writing “Yes, please” next to “sex”; (h) not mentioning that you were chairman of the fundraising committee at Wulfrun College before noting that your last job involved working as finance director of a FTSE 100 company; (i) not attaching a note to your contact details explaining that potential employers should leave messages with your mum, in the event that you’re not at home; and, most important, (j) not sending your CV to anyone and everyone, in particular to random business columnists whose total lack of authority extends to being unable to offer employment.

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