An Iranian resume follows conventions that look startling from outside: a photo is normal, military service status is a screening field for men, and referees are listed by name with phone numbers. The market is also split in two — a Persian resume for domestic employers and an English one for multinationals, dollar-paying remote work and anything that leads abroad — and the two documents are not translations of each other.
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The six questions people ask most, answered in a line each.
What it's called in Iran: Rezume (رزومه)
1–2 pages
One page for a first job, two once you have several roles. Iranian recruiters are less strict about the page count than about whether the screening fields are filled in.
Expected on a Persian resume
A plain, formal headshot on a light background. Leave it off the English version you send abroad, where it works against you.
Persian at home, English for outside
Keep two separate files. Mixing Persian headings with English bullets is the most common self-inflicted wound in the Iranian market.
Jalali at home, Gregorian abroad
Pick one calendar per document and stay in it. A resume that mixes 1402 and 2024 forces the reader to do arithmetic.
PDF — always, for Persian text
A DOCX opened on a machine without your Persian font turns into broken glyphs and lost half-spaces. PDF freezes the typography.
Listed in full, with contact details
Two or three named referees with role and phone number is standard here — and should be deleted from any resume you send to the US, UK or Germany.
Resumito's country engine turns each of these on or off automatically when you pick Iran as your target.
Profile photo
We prompt you for it and include it on the resume.
Date of birth
You can add it, but it's not needed.
Nationality
You can add it, but it's not needed.
Marital status
You can add it, but it's not needed.
Military service status
We prompt you for it and include it on the resume.
Place of birth
We keep this field out of your Iran resume.
References
Listed in full on the resumeHobbies & interests
Not shownTop to bottom, the order a Iran employer expects to read.
Personal details and photo
Name, phone, email, city, and the photo. National ID number is not needed and should not be published on a document you email around.
Military service status (men)
Completed, exempt, or in progress with the expected end date. Many Iranian employers screen on this before reading anything else.
Professional summary
Three or four lines. Field, years of experience, and the two things you are actually good at — no slogans.
Work experience
Reverse-chronological, with company, role and dates. Include contract, freelance and remote work explicitly — it is normal here and reads as range.
Education
Degree, university, year, GPA. Iranian employers do read the GPA, and a university's ranking still carries weight in the first screen.
Skills, languages, tools
Give your English level honestly — IELTS or TOEFL score if you have one, level if you do not. It is one of the most-checked fields in the country.
References
Two or three, with role and number, and ask them first. Referees are called in Iran more often than applicants expect.
The Persian and English versions differ in content, not just in language. The Persian one carries a photo, military service status, sometimes date of birth and marital status, and named referees — all fields a domestic employer expects. The English one drops every single one of those, because in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia they are either legally awkward or simply meaningless, and their presence marks the document as an import.
The other difference is what the achievements point at. A Persian resume for a Tehran company can assume the reader knows what your employer is and how big it is. An English resume cannot, so every company name needs a scale clause and every internal job title needs a market-standard equivalent. This is why running your Persian file through a translator produces something that reads correctly and lands badly.
For men applying inside Iran this is a hard screening field, not an optional detail. Many HR teams will not schedule an interview without knowing the answer, because an employee who could be called up mid-project is a planning problem. Write it in one plain line near your personal details: completed (with the year), exempt (permanent or medical), or in progress with the expected discharge date.
If your service involved real work — you administered a network, ran logistics for a unit, taught, translated, maintained equipment — write those months up as a job in your experience section, not just as a status line. Two years is a long time to represent as a blank. On the English resume, delete the status field entirely and keep only the work, described the way you would describe any other role.
A Persian resume is judged partly on whether it looks like it was set by someone who reads Persian. The tells are small and cumulative: missing half-spaces (نیمفاصله) inside compound words, Arabic ي and ك instead of Persian ی and ک, Latin digits scattered among Persian ones, and stretched letter-spacing that breaks the joins between characters. Persian script is connected — spacing letters apart does not look elegant, it looks broken.
Use a screen-legible Persian family — Vazirmatn, IRANSans, Shabnam or similar — at a comfortable size with generous line height, keep numbers in one script throughout, and export to PDF so nothing reflows on the recruiter's machine. If you include an English term inline, such as a framework name, let it sit as an LTR island inside the Persian line rather than transliterating it into Persian letters.
A growing share of Iranian professionals are not looking for a Tehran office at all — they want remote contracts with companies abroad. That market reads a resume differently. The employer cannot check your references easily, cannot verify your employer, and is not going to run a background check across a sanctions boundary, so they substitute public evidence: a GitHub profile with real commit history, published articles, a portfolio site, a Behance or Dribbble, an existing platform rating.
So put the links in the header, not at the bottom, and make sure what they point at is presentable today. State your time zone as an overlap rather than as a location — "UTC+3:30, 5+ hours overlap with CET" answers the question a European client is actually asking. And write in the same plain, quantified English the destination market uses; a remote client is reading you against candidates from a dozen countries at once.
The errors that sink the largest number of otherwise strong resumes.
Sending the Persian resume abroad
Photo, birth date, marital status, military service and named referees are all standard here and all liabilities there. Keep two files and never send the wrong one.
Mixing Jalali and Gregorian dates
1400 in one row and 2023 in the next makes the timeline unreadable and looks careless. One calendar per document.
Publishing your national ID or address
No employer needs your کد ملی to decide on an interview, and a resume travels through many inboxes. City is enough; identity documents belong in the hiring paperwork.
Listing referees without asking them
Iranian employers call referees more often than applicants assume. A former manager surprised by the call gives a lukewarm answer, which is worse than having no referee listed.
Overstating your English level
"Fluent" is tested in the first call at any company with foreign clients. A real IELTS band, or an honest "upper-intermediate, comfortable in written English", survives contact with reality.
Most people here need both documents eventually, so build the Persian one in a way that makes the English one cheap to produce. That mainly means writing achievements as facts with numbers from the start — team size, users, revenue, latency, budget, percentage change — because numbers survive translation intact while adjectives do not.
Keep the English names of your employers and your university exactly as they appear on official documents and on the company's own English site. An inconsistent transliteration — Sharif University of Technology in one place, Sharif Univ. Tech. in another, and something else on your transcript — makes verification harder at exactly the moment it matters, whether that is a foreign recruiter searching or a credential evaluator matching records.
One more thing worth planning ahead: keep a private record of your employment dates, managers' names and their current contact details while you still work there. Reconstructing that three years later, after people have changed companies and phone numbers, is the single most tedious part of any foreign application, credential assessment or visa file.
On the Persian version for domestic employers, yes — a plain formal headshot is the norm and its absence is noticed. On any English version going to the US, Canada, the UK or Australia, remove it: there a photo creates a discrimination risk for the employer and can get your file discarded.
One line near your personal details: completed with the year, exempt, or in progress with the expected end date. Many Iranian employers screen on it before reading further. If the service involved real work, also write those months up as a job.
Jalali on the Persian resume for Iranian employers, Gregorian on the English one. What matters most is consistency: never mix the two calendars inside one document, because the reader then has to convert in their head to see your timeline.
No. A translation keeps fields that damage you abroad — photo, birth date, marital status, military status, named referees — and keeps company names that mean nothing to a foreign reader. Build the English version as its own document, with a scale clause for each employer and market-standard job titles.
A modern screen-legible family such as Vazirmatn, IRANSans or Shabnam, exported to PDF so it renders identically everywhere. Use proper half-spaces in compound words, Persian ی and ک rather than the Arabic forms, and never apply letter-spacing — it breaks the joins that make Persian readable.
Yes — two or three, with their role and phone number, which is the local convention and different from most Western markets. Ask permission first, because Iranian employers do call. Delete the whole section from resumes you send to the US, UK or Germany.
Nothing, unless you tell them. Add a short scale clause after each name — sector, size, users or revenue, country — so a decade at a large Iranian bank or marketplace reads as the serious experience it is rather than as an unknown line on a page.
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 — Iran gets its own rules, shown above.
Yes — you can build and download your first Iran-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 Iran as your target country and Resumito turns each of these fields on or off for you — nothing to memorise.
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