🇺🇸 United States CV format

The American résumé is the strictest mainstream format, and the mistakes people make coming from South Asia are consistent and costly.

Remove the photo

Not a preference — a liability. A document showing an applicant's race, age and gender creates discrimination exposure for the employer, and many US companies instruct recruiters to discard résumés carrying one before reading. Some applicant tracking systems strip them automatically.

Remove personal details

Date of birth, marital status, religion, nationality, father's name, national ID number, gender. All standard on CVs in much of South Asia, all inappropriate here, and several of them are illegal for a US employer to ask about.

One page, unless you are senior

Two pages is acceptable after roughly ten years of experience. Below that, one page is the expectation, and a two-page résumé from a graduate reads as someone who cannot edit.

Set the paper size to Letter

US Letter is 216 × 279 mm; A4 is 210 × 297 mm. An A4 layout printed on Letter loses the bottom of the page. Change this in the builder's Design panel — it takes one click and is the most commonly missed step.

Other conventions

• Reverse chronological order, most recent first
• No "Curriculum Vitae" heading — the document is a résumé, and in the US a CV means an academic document with publications
• Skip the references line entirely
• US spelling throughout
• Quantify aggressively; American résumé culture expects numbers