Working in Europe

CV vs Resume in Europe: What to Send Where

In Europe a CV is the normal job application document, not an academic record. What the word means country by country, and why one page is a US rule.

In Europe, "CV" is the ordinary word for the document you send with a job application. In the United States, those same two letters usually mean an academic record: publications, grants, teaching, conference papers, no length limit, used by people applying for research and faculty posts. Both meanings are correct at home. The confusion is a translation problem, and it costs people interviews when they solve it in the wrong direction.

If a company in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain or Sweden asks for your CV, they want a working document about your jobs and skills, one to two pages, reverse chronological. If a European university department asks for your CV, they may well want the long academic version, and the posting will make that obvious by asking about publications and funding.

What each market calls it

Outside the United States, "resume" is not a separate document type with its own rules. It is a word some employers borrowed, usually because the company is American-owned or because the posting was written in English by someone who learned recruitment vocabulary from LinkedIn. A Dutch scale-up asking for your resume still wants a Dutch CV.

The one-page rule is a US convention, not a standard

The one-page résumé grew out of a market with very high application volumes, a heavy screening culture, and a legal environment that pushes employers away from anything resembling a personal record. It works there. In most of Europe it reads as thin, because a CV is expected to account for your working life rather than advertise the best parts of it.

Rough expectations by market:

1. UK and Ireland. Two pages, and two pages is a real limit rather than a suggestion.
2. Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Two pages of Lebenslauf in reverse chronological order, with no unexplained gaps in the dates.
3. Netherlands. One to two pages, factual, very little adjectival padding.
4. France. One page early in a career, two after roughly a decade.
5. Nordics. One to two pages, usually opening with a short personal profile.
6. Spain and Italy. Two pages is unremarkable.

The country-by-country detail sits in CV length by country. The pattern worth carrying away is that European recruiters are not counting pages as a proxy for discipline. They are reading for whether the record is complete.

Personal details are where the two documents genuinely differ

A US résumé strips out anything that could support a discrimination claim: no photograph, no date of birth, no nationality, no marital status. That is a legal reflex specific to the American hiring system, and applicants often carry it into Europe on the assumption it is universal good practice.

It is not. On a German, Swiss or Spanish CV, nationality is a standard field and its absence looks like an omission. A photograph is conventional in the same markets and unwelcome in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands, where recruiters have been trained to treat one as a bias risk. Date of birth follows a similar split. None of this is about how you present yourself; it is about which fields a local reader expects to find and what they conclude when a field is missing.

CV photo rules by country has the full picture, and the German Lebenslauf covers the strictest version of these conventions.

What to actually change when you cross the Atlantic

Take a US résumé and the work is mechanical rather than creative:

• Add the personal details the destination country expects, and remove the ones it does not.
• Set page size to A4. US Letter is visibly wrong when printed in Europe, and it does get printed.
• Convert dates to the local format. 03/04/2025 means March in the US and April almost everywhere else.
• Rename sections into the local vocabulary. "Professional Experience" becomes Berufserfahrung on a German CV, Expérience professionnelle on a French one.
• Fill the gaps. A six-month break that a US résumé would quietly skip needs a line on a German CV.
• Drop "References available on request." It has been a dead line in every European market for a decade.
• Reconsider the summary. American résumé summaries lean on scale and superlatives. Dutch and Nordic readers discount that language rather than being persuaded by it.

When the posting is ambiguous, read the employer, not the word

Some postings genuinely do not tell you. A German subsidiary of a US bank, hiring in English, may ask for a "resume" while the hiring manager reading it grew up on the Lebenslauf. The tiebreaker is the employer's centre of gravity: where the team sits, which entity issues the contract, and what language the interview will be in. When those point to Europe, send the European document. It is readable to an American recruiter either way, whereas a one-page US résumé looks incomplete to a European one.

The exception is a genuine academic post. If the role is a postdoc, lectureship or research fellowship anywhere in Europe, the academic CV convention applies and the two-page limit does not.

Keeping one record and formatting it per country

The workable approach is a single, complete base document plus a formatting step, rather than four half-maintained files that drift apart. Involve works this way: you keep one base resume, pick the destination country, and the output takes that country's conventions for page size, length, personal details, section headings and date format. The base is never overwritten, so adding a new job means editing one document rather than five.

There is also a difference worth knowing between two things people call the same thing. Localising means the headings and dates move into the local language while your own sentences stay exactly as you wrote them. Translating means every sentence is rewritten, with the original kept alongside so you can check it. For most applications to English-speaking teams in Germany or the Netherlands, localising is enough. For a French or Spanish public-sector role advertised in the local language, it usually is not.

You can see the country formatting and the job board itself at the app without paying for anything.