Make Your CV Fast

CV or resume, and why it matters here

In the United States a resume is a one or two page summary and a CV is a long academic record. In the UK, Ireland, much of Europe and many Commonwealth countries, CV simply means the document you send with a job application.

So the first question a CV maker has to answer is which one you need, because the conventions differ on length, personal details and whether publications belong on it at all.

What to leave off, depending on where you are applying

This is where international applicants most often trip, and it is easy to fix:

• US applications: no photo, no date of birth, no marital status, no nationality.
• Many European markets: a photo is conventional and its absence is noticed.
• Academic CVs: length is expected, and publications, grants and teaching all belong.
• Everywhere: full home address is no longer standard. City and country is enough.

Improving a CV you already have

Most people do not need to start again. To enhance a CV, work in this order: fix anything that breaks extraction, then the structure, then the wording. Doing it in the reverse order means rewriting lines that later move.

The highest-value single change is usually converting duty descriptions into outcomes. Ran the team becomes Ran a four-person rota through a system migration with no missed shifts.

How long a CV should be

For a non-academic CV, two pages is the working maximum for most careers, and one page is right early on. Length signals editing, and a reader notices the difference.

Academic CVs are the exception and can run much longer, because completeness is the point. If you are unsure which you are writing, our academic CV format guide covers the sections and ordering.

Check the export before you send

Whatever you build it in, open the exported file and try to select the body text. If it copies out cleanly and in order, automated systems can read it.

That check takes twenty seconds and catches the failure that costs people the most applications, which is a beautifully designed document that no parser can see inside.

For most jobs, yes. Kazifi builds either, and where a longer academic CV is needed it handles that too.

No. Upload your current CV and Kazifi rebuilds it into a clean, ATS-ready draft.

Two pages is the working maximum for most careers, one page early on. Academic CVs are the exception and run much longer by convention.

Not for US applications, where photos, date of birth and marital status are left off. In much of continental Europe a photo is conventional and its absence is noticed.

Contact details, a short summary, experience with outcomes, education and skills. Publications, grants and teaching belong on an academic CV and not on others.

Fix anything that breaks text extraction, then the structure, then the wording. That order avoids rewriting lines that later move.