In Britain the document is a CV, never a resume, and the shape is settled: two sides of A4, a short personal statement at the top, no photo, no age, no marital status. The Equality Act 2010 pushed identifying details off the page for good, and what replaced them is a personal statement that has to earn its four lines and work experience written in British spelling and British understatement.
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The six questions people ask most, answered in a line each.
What it's called in United Kingdom: CV (curriculum vitae)
2 pages — "two sides of A4"
Two is the standard and expected length. One page for students and school leavers. Three or more is for academic and medical CVs only.
No
Under the Equality Act 2010, a photo hands the employer protected characteristics they must not consider. UK recruiters expect a CV without one.
British English throughout
Organise, specialise, programme, centre, licence as a noun. American spelling in a UK CV is noticed immediately.
Mon YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY elsewhere
"Jan 2023 – Mar 2025" in the experience section. Note the day-first order in any full date — 03/04/2025 is 3 April here, not 4 March.
PDF or DOCX, A4
A4, not US Letter. Recruitment agencies often ask for Word so they can add their own branding — send DOCX when they request it.
"Available on request" or omitted
Never print referee names and numbers on the CV. UK employers request them after an offer, and many roles need a reference covering the last few years.
Resumito's country engine turns each of these on or off automatically when you pick United Kingdom as your target.
Profile photo
Employers in United Kingdom can't ask for this — we strip it out to keep you compliant.
Date of birth
We keep this field out of your United Kingdom resume.
Nationality
We keep this field out of your United Kingdom resume.
Marital status
Employers in United Kingdom can't ask for this — we strip it out to keep you compliant.
Military service status
We keep this field out of your United Kingdom resume.
Place of birth
We keep this field out of your United Kingdom resume.
References
Noted as "available on request"Hobbies & interests
Not shownTop to bottom, the order a United Kingdom employer expects to read.
Personal details
Name, phone, email, town or city, LinkedIn. No full address, no date of birth, no nationality, no photo.
Personal statement
Three to four lines, tailored to the role. This is a genuine UK convention, not padding — recruiters read it as your pitch.
Work experience
Reverse-chronological with job title, employer, location and dates, then achievement bullets. Explain any gap in a short line.
Education and qualifications
Degree, university, dates, classification (First, 2:1). For foreign degrees, add the UK ENIC comparison.
Skills
Job-relevant and concrete. Include any UK professional membership or licence, which carries a lot of weight here.
Interests and references line
Interests are optional and only worth including if specific. Close with "References available on request" or nothing at all.
British CVs open with three or four lines of prose, and unlike the American summary — which is often skipped — it is genuinely read. What kills it is generality. "A hardworking and motivated professional with excellent communication skills seeking a challenging role" could be attached to any CV ever written, and a recruiter who reads forty of these a day has stopped seeing the words.
Write it as three facts and one intention: what you are, how long you have done it, the single most relevant thing you have delivered, and what you are looking for now. "Management accountant with six years in FMCG, most recently running monthly close for a £40m division; looking to move into a business partnering role in the North West." That is specific enough to be false if it were, which is exactly what makes it credible.
The Equality Act 2010 defines nine protected characteristics — including age, race, religion, sex, marital status and disability — that an employer must not use in hiring decisions. Nothing forbids you from volunteering them, but doing so creates a problem for the employer rather than an advantage for you: many UK recruiters and public-sector bodies anonymise applications precisely to prove they did not see these details.
So the practical list of what to leave off is: photograph, date of birth, age, nationality, marital status, number of children, religion, health and disability status, and your national insurance number. Graduation years can stay or go depending on whether you would rather not signal your age. Right to work is handled separately, at offer stage, with document checks — it is not a CV field.
The UK runs a licensed sponsorship system: only employers on the Home Office register of licensed sponsors can hire someone on a Skilled Worker visa, and that register is public. Checking it before you apply saves a great deal of wasted effort, because an unlicensed employer cannot hire you no matter how well the interview goes.
If you already have the right to work, say so in one short line near your contact details — "Right to work in the UK (settled status)" or "Graduate visa valid to 09/2027". If you need sponsorship, do not make that the headline of your CV; answer it in the application form's own question, and spend the CV proving you are worth the sponsorship fee and the paperwork.
British professional writing runs cooler than American. "Spearheaded a revolutionary transformation of the entire customer journey" reads as inflated in London in a way it does not in New York, and inflation invites the reader to discount everything else you have written. "Led the redesign of the online claims journey, cutting average handling time by 22%" makes the same claim and survives scrutiny.
Two habits that read as competence here: name the outcome rather than the effort, and be precise about your own contribution in team work. "Part of the four-person team that migrated 2.3m customer records, owning the reconciliation logic" is trusted more than a claim to have done the whole migration alone — and it is the kind of sentence a UK interviewer will happily spend ten minutes on.
The errors that sink the largest number of otherwise strong resumes.
Calling it a resume
In the UK the document is a CV. Naming your file "resume.pdf" or writing "Resume" as the title is a small tell that the document was written for another market.
American spelling throughout
Organized, specialized, program, center, analyze. Set your document language to English (UK) and let the spell checker do the work.
A one-page CV for an experienced role
The US instinct to compress works against you here. Two full sides of A4 is the expected format, and squeezing ten years onto one page reads as thin, not disciplined.
Printing referee names and phone numbers
UK convention is to hold them back until asked. Publishing a former manager's mobile number on a document that circulates through agencies is also a data protection problem.
Leaving a gap unexplained
UK recruiters read the timeline closely and will ask. A one-line entry — travel, caring responsibilities, study, redundancy and job search — closes the question before it opens.
Start with the sponsor register rather than the job boards. Only licensed sponsors can issue a Certificate of Sponsorship for a Skilled Worker visa, so filtering your search to those employers changes your hit rate more than any wording on the CV. The Global Talent route is worth checking separately if you have a strong record in research, digital technology or the arts, since it does not need an employer at all.
Get your degree compared through UK ENIC and write the result on the CV in one clause — "BSc Computer Engineering, University of Tehran (UK ENIC: comparable to a UK bachelor's degree with honours)". British hiring is unusually attentive to degree classification, and "comparable to a 2:1" does more work than a GPA a UK reader has no scale for.
Strip the Iranian screening fields — photo, date of birth, marital status, military service — and replace the referee block with the single conventional line. Then add a UK-reachable contact route: an email you monitor and a phone number in +98 format written correctly, or a UK mobile if you have one. Recruiters in Britain call more than they email, and an unreachable number ends the process quietly.
Two sides of A4 is the standard, and that is what employers expect from anyone with a few years of experience. One page suits students and school leavers. Academic, medical and research CVs are the exception and run much longer.
No. Under the Equality Act 2010 employers must not consider protected characteristics, and a photo hands them several at once. Many UK organisations anonymise CVs before shortlisting, so a photo can actively complicate your application.
In British usage there is no meaningful distinction — the document is simply called a CV, and it is the two-page job application document. The American separation, where a CV means a long academic record, does not apply here.
It is the norm and genuinely read, unlike its American cousin. Keep it to three or four lines and rewrite it for each application: your field, your experience, one concrete result, and what you are looking for now.
Do not write your nationality — it is a protected characteristic. Do write a single line about work rights if you have them, such as settled status or a valid Graduate visa, since it removes a practical obstacle. Right-to-work checks happen at offer stage with documents, not from the CV.
Get a statement of comparability from UK ENIC and put the result next to your degree in one clause. British employers read degree classifications closely, and "comparable to a UK bachelor's degree with honours" is far more legible to them than a 20-point GPA.
Often, yes — one page, addressed to a named person where you can find one. For applicants abroad it is the natural place to state availability, notice period and work rights in full sentences rather than compressing them onto the CV.
It's not the same template. Resumito's country engine (8 data points per country) toggles which personal fields and sections appear based on your target country — United Kingdom gets its own rules, shown above.
Yes — you can build and download your first United Kingdom-formatted resume on the free plan, no credit card required.
Yes, you can change your target country any time from the resume editor and Resumito re-applies the field rules instantly.
Pick United Kingdom as your target country and Resumito turns each of these fields on or off for you — nothing to memorise.
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