European CV formats

The Dutch CV Format: Plain, Two Pages, No Photo

How to write a CV for the Netherlands: two plain A4 pages, no photo or date of birth, a short profile at the top, and why English is fine at Dutch firms.

The Dutch CV is the least decorated document in this cluster. Two pages of A4, no photograph, no date of birth, no nationality line, a short profile at the top, and then the evidence. If you have a working British or Irish CV you are most of the way there already, which is not true of Germany or France.

The interesting part is not the format. It is how directly the content gets read.

The format at a glance

That puts the Netherlands in the same group as the UK and Ireland on personal details, and in a group of its own on language, because English is genuinely accepted here in a way it is not in Paris or Madrid.

The profile at the top

A Dutch CV opens with a short Profiel, and unlike its British equivalent it is actually read. Three or four lines, and every line should be checkable against the rest of the page.

What works is specific: what you do, at what level, in what sort of organisation, and what you are applying for. What fails is the version everyone writes, the one about being a driven and enthusiastic professional with a passion for results. Dutch hiring culture is unusually blunt about inflated claims, and a profile that overstates gives the reader a reason to test everything below it. It is better to sound slightly under-sold and be believed.

A rough shape:

Logistics planner, six years in cross-border road freight, currently running the daily schedule for a fleet of 40 vehicles at a mid-sized carrier. Looking for a planning role with more responsibility for carrier selection and cost. Dutch B1, English fluent.

Nothing in that is decorative and all of it is checkable.

No photo, no birthday, no nationality

The Netherlands takes the same view as the UK and Ireland, and for the same reason. A photograph hands the employer your approximate age, your ethnicity and your sex, which are things they are not permitted to select on. Once the file contains them, the employer cannot show the shortlist was drawn without them. Dutch employers and recruitment agencies are alert to this and many will strip a photo before a CV reaches a hiring manager.

Date of birth goes for the same reason, and nationality with it. If you need a work permit, that is a question for the application form or the first conversation, not an unprompted line on page one. We have written about how to handle right-to-work status without leading with it.

If you are moving between countries and have been carrying a CV with a photo because Germany or Spain wanted one, that document is now wrong for Amsterdam. The full split, and why France and the Netherlands land on opposite sides of it, is set out in CV photo rules by country.

English is fine, and that is not a courtesy

This surprises people who assume that applying in the local language is always safer. In the Netherlands it usually is not necessary.

English is the working language of a large share of Dutch professional employment, including at Dutch companies with entirely Dutch staff, and an application in English is not read as a failure to make an effort. The signal to follow is the posting. If the advert is in Dutch, the role probably requires Dutch and your CV should be in Dutch. If the advert is in English, write in English, even if the company name is unmistakably Dutch.

Where you do have Dutch, say so with a named level rather than a hedge. "Nederlands B1" tells the reader something. "Basic Dutch" does not, and "conversational" means whatever the reader decides it means.

If you want the document to look local while your own sentences stay in English, that is a separate decision from translating it. Involve Resume treats localising, where the headings become Profiel, Werkervaring, Opleiding, Vaardigheden, Talen and Certificeringen and dates take the local form, as a different choice from a full translation, and it keeps the original beside any translated version. The warning attached to the second option is worth repeating: a translated CV saying something slightly different from what you did is still a CV saying something you did not do.

What gets read, and how

Dutch reading habits reward a particular kind of writing.

Directness is not rudeness here, and understatement is not modesty. State what happened, attach a number where a number exists, and stop. Where no number exists, do not invent one: a made-up percentage is the easiest thing in the world for an interviewer to unpick, and Dutch interviewers ask.

Gaps are treated more relaxedly than in Germany. A year of travel, a period of study, time off after a redundancy: name it in a line and move on. Nobody expects the unbroken upward trajectory that some other markets pretend to want.

Length, and what to do with the old jobs

Two pages, and the second page should be earning its place. The standing principle applies here as everywhere: when you run out of room, demote old roles rather than deleting them. A role that disappears becomes a gap, and a gap costs you more than a two-line entry ever would.

So the last five to eight years get full entries with bullets, and everything older collapses under a short heading giving employer, title and dates only. The timeline stays whole and the page count comes down. The country-by-country version of that argument is in CV length by country.

Assembling it

The practical run-through for a Dutch application:

1. Strip the photo, date of birth and nationality if a previous country format put them there.
2. Two pages of A4, older roles demoted to single lines.
3. Rewrite the profile into three or four checkable lines.
4. Put a named level on every language.
5. Match the language of the CV to the language of the posting.
6. Replace adjectives with what actually happened.

Choosing the Netherlands as the destination country in Involve Resume handles the mechanical half of that: page size and length, the personal-details rules, Dutch headings if you want them, and the local date format, applied to the base CV without overwriting it. The tailoring pass reorders what you already wrote against a specific posting and shows you a diff with a reason per change before anything is saved.

Dutch and Belgian postings sit on the job board alongside the rest of Europe, each with a badge showing where the listing came from.