The US resume: what changes coming from Europe

The American resume is the strictest document of the lot about what it will not carry. Almost everything a French, Spanish or German CV puts at the top has to come off.

What comes off

	European CV	US resume
Photo	common to expected	never
Date of birth	common	never
Nationality, marital status	common	never
Full address	usual	city and state only
Length	1-3 pages	1-2 pages

US anti-discrimination law makes employers wary of holding age, ethnicity or family status before a decision. Many companies configure their systems to reject resumes carrying a photo outright, and recruiters are trained to stop reading when personal details appear. This is the single most common mistake European applicants make.

A word about the word

In the United States, resume and CV are different documents.

A resume is the standard job application document: one to two pages, tailored to the role. A CV means an academic record (publications, grants, teaching, conference talks) and runs to many pages. It is used for academic, research and some medical positions, and almost nowhere else.

Send a “CV” to an American company for a commercial role and you have signalled unfamiliarity before anyone reads a line.

Results before duties

American resumes are read for impact, more aggressively than anywhere in Europe. The convention is a bullet that names what changed and by how much.

Rebuilt the checkout flow, lifting completed purchases 18% quarter over quarter.

Not:

Worked on the checkout flow with the product team.

Where you have no numbers, name the outcome anyway: a process that got faster, a system that stopped failing, a team that grew.

Writing for the machine first

Large US employers filter applications through an applicant tracking system before a person sees them. That has practical consequences for the document:

• Mirror the exact job title from the posting where it honestly matches yours
• Use the vocabulary of the posting rather than synonyms: a system matching on “project management” may not credit “programme delivery”
• Keep to a single column; multi-column layouts get parsed out of order
• Avoid text inside images, headers and footers
• Send a PDF unless the posting asks for something else

The advice is not to game the filter. It is to make sure a machine can read what you actually did.

One page or two

One page for early career. Two once you have roughly a decade behind you. Three is for academic CVs, not resumes.

Do not shrink the type to force one page. A readable two pages beats an unreadable one.