A serious question given all the posts about typos above. Are you talking about spelling errors or grammatical errors? Surely everyone uses a spell checker for the first?

I used to recruit software engineers in my previous career. I started up a recruitment business during that time as well and used to the candidates myself before sending their CV to the client. That worked because I was an experienced software engineer myself.
That worked out quite well but I didn't enjoy trying to find suitable candidates and packed it in. Your experience mirrors mine in terms of the quality of CV. In general they were dreadful. It was very common for clients to ask for 10 essential skills. They would specify ESSENTIAL skills on one job spec as follows: 5-10 years experience of C, C++, Java, Linux, Perl, PHP, HTML, CSS, a few specific microprocessors, several specific embedded operating systems. That was just the essentials. All for a salary of £25k to £50k. Some clients even specify the type of University you must have graduated from AND they wanted only those who scored all top grades at school even if you had a PhD. Honestly it was a nightmare. In my book, if you have more than 2 to 3 essential skills then you are not thinking properly about the person you want to hire so I like the fact you only look for 3.

You are welcome. It should be possible to laugh at most of it eventually. Might take a while though. Todays troubles are tomorrows source of humour. I stopped worrying about people not caring about my troubles when I realised I wasnt particularly interested in theirs either. That seemed fair to me. I was having a low point last week and my two daughters asked if they could each have a bound copy of my thesis with gold lettering on the spine. They wanted to use it as a family heirloom to hand onto their own children. They are 15 and 19 years old. I wont lie. I had to leave the room or I would have dissolved into a soggy mess right in front of them.

Is it really as much as that? I genuinely had no idea.

Leaving aside the bit about applying for every job in the world because nobody is suggesting that, your logic is flawed here. Getting a job is largely a numbers and probability game. Just because you cant get jobs where you have 100% of the skills doesnt necessarily mean you cant get jobs where you only have 40% of the skills. It just doesnt work like that. You may find an employer who will be happy to hire someone cheaper and be prepared to train you.This is very common.

Interesting post. You say candidates must have all of the essential skills you have listed.
Hypothetically what would you do if you couldn't find someone with all of those skills?
How long would you wait before hiring someone who was missing one of the essential skills?

I would not read too much into the feedback you get. People won't want to to be rude so you can't trust what they are telling you. Getting training on interview techniques is probably a wise move.

Yes I understand that you are desparate and that it is not unreasonable to be so but if employers get a whiff of it your application is dead in the water.

As for your last part, this is probably the most enlightening. When you see a job application with a list of attributes or skills a prospective employee must have, how many do you feel you have to have before applying? I would almost always ignore the list entirely. If I had the skills I would list them and not mention the others. If I had none of the skills, I would simply state that and explain why they should take a chance on me. Then I would repeat this for as many jobs as I felt interested in until someone called me.
Many people feel they should not apply unless they had 8 or more out of 10 but this is lunacy. Some research a while back indicated that women are particularly bad at this for some reason (possibly related to Imposter Syndrome). If you are waiting to get a full house of skills for the job then that might be one of your problems.

Pretty much sounds like the experience of every PhD student I have ever met, including my own.
Everyday brings a list of things to do and in most occasions there isn't a single simple thing on the list. Some examples:

1) Quickly print a page. Printer out of paper. Replace paper easily enough. Press print. It's also out of toner. Organise toner. Colleagues emptied both and simply could not be arsed fixing it themselves. Don't even get me started on staplers without staples. Takes an hour to get supervisor in to authorise the purchase. Computer people out to lunch. Come back an hour later. Toner replaced. Excellent! But students are on campus so internet is a bit dodgy. Printer not contactable. At this point I am blowing steam out of my ears.

2) Send in timesheet to get paid for tutorials. Easy enough but Finance department have removed the common sheet we used to fill in and replaced it with a month specific sheet for some reason. They emailed me it ages ago and I deleted it. Now I have to trawl my trash folder but I can't find it. Emailed my colleagues and finally get a copy of it but the form requires things called Business codes, department codes, job IDs, course IDs and I don't know what they are. Three trips made to department office to find these numbers from the secretary. She doesn't have them. No idea who does have them. Three hours later I finally get them from someone prepared to admit they know them. Go to submit form and they ask for my employee number. Finance won't gve me it without proof of my ID which I don't have on me that day. The employee number is on a payslip from a year ago and I don't have it with me. Have to do it the following day now.

You have to laugh at this stuff or you will cry.

This PhD is the single hardest thing I have ever undertaken in my life and that is coming from someone who has brought three children up to adulthood. Nobody but nobody gives a shit whether you make it and your family and friends have no idea what you are going through. You are on your own. On the positive side, I remember that only a handful of people get PhDs in the first place so obtaining one automatically puts you in an elite class academically. You've made it to the top academic education rung our society has to offer. I reckon that in the UK we only graduate about 1000 PhD students per year. The workplace contains people between the ages of around 25 and 65 which means there is 40 years of people with PhDs out there in the UK workplace or about 40,000 people who have achieved the same academic qualification out of a current UK workforce of about 30 million people. Remembering that helps me sleep at night :-D

You are joking right?

There are no easy answers to this.
There are only so many hours in the day.
Finding balance is about understanding you cant have it all when you have so many things you want to be good at.
Priorities have to be set and sacrifices have to be made.
For me, I put work first and family second. Fortunately I have a spouse who wanted the exact opposite. Without her, there would have been serious problems. I didnt neglect my family but I sacrificed the things I wasnt remotely interested in like helping with homework, going to school events, reading stories (UGH!) etc. Instead, we all went and spent the entire weekend doing things together and had cake, tea and film nights during the week. I discovered I had a great talent for putting on sock puppet and shadow puppets shows. Turns out that kids need their parents a lot less than we believe.

You have a paper written up already. By any standard you are doing well.
I think it is way too early to be panicking about your thesis.
It is highly likely that you will be faster with the repeat as you are more competent now.
As for the thesis, I would say that 2 to 3 papers is a good PhD. Some have more than that but huge numbers of students end up with just one. Plenty end up with zero. All of them usually end up passing.
Talk to your supervisor and ask him to be blunt with you about all this.

In fairness I was assuming everyone would realise I was not talking about things like pregnancy and cancer.

Yeah I think we are talking about similar things. I don't like having a mindset which treats good things happening to me as luck because it promotes Imposter Syndrome. Yes some luck is involved but over a period of time, the good things which happen to me can't all be just luck. When I sit back and think about it honestly, most of it has been down to my own actions. Critical evaluation is extremely important to me and that doesn't just mean having a go at myself for things I did wrong (although I am a strong believer in doing exactly as you do). It also means taking the time to appreciate that I've done well in tasks. In my opinion it is vital that you have the ability to evaluate your self positively as well. That's a hard for British people because we are hamstrung by a poisonous culture which says it is somehow unseemly to consider yourself to be good at certain things. We are wrongly taught that this is arrogance. No wonder so many struggle with Imposter Syndrome, a lack of belief in our own abilities, a fear of failure and a subsequent lack of ambition. As a nation we are being left behind by more confident nations.
Blimey I am glad I got that off my chest :-D

Anyway I think you have to find a method which works for you.

I don't think a single poster on this thread talked about anyone being a failure so I'm not sure where you are coming from here.

I think you are asking for the wrong type of help.
If you have had 20 interviews then clearly the problem isn't your CV.
I would suggest that it's probably your performance at interview which is the issue because if you've been invited along then your lack of a PhD has already been made irrelevant. Now it's all about how you perform on the day.
You need someone to help you assess how you come across in front of an employer.
I don't know who you are and can only go by your post above but you sound desperate for any old job. It is very likely that an experienced recruiter will smell this a mile away and make the decision that you are not interested in what their company gets out of hiring you but more about what you get out of being hired.
You also mentioned not being ambitious. Again that could come across in an interview as a very unattractive quality in a candidate.
Only you will know if I am in the right ballpark here but hopefully I've given you something to think about.