Two forces shape every "correct" CV format
There's no universal right way to write a CV — what's expected, and what's even legal to include, is shaped by two different forces in every country: employment law (what an employer is allowed to ask for or use in a hiring decision) and hiring culture (what recruiters actually expect to see, independent of what the law requires). The two don't always point the same direction, and neither one is optional to get right if you're applying across borders.
The Anglosphere: strip personal data
The US, UK, Canada, and Australia have all moved, to varying degrees, toward CVs with minimal personal data — no photo, no date of birth, no marital status, no nationality. This is driven directly by anti-discrimination law: including this information creates legal exposure for the employer (it's evidence they could have discriminated on a protected characteristic, even if they didn't), so the convention has become to simply not provide it. A photo on a CV applying to a US company doesn't just look unusual — it can make a recruiter uneasy about liability and cause them to route the application to legal review or discard it outright.
Continental Europe: mixed, and country-specific
Europe doesn't move as one bloc here. Germany and France still commonly include a photo and date of birth on a Lebenslauf / CV — it's a long-standing cultural norm, not a legal requirement, and increasingly contested, but still widely practiced. The Netherlands and the Nordic countries lean closer to the Anglosphere pattern — photo optional-to-uncommon, personal data minimal. Belgium sits in between: a photo is common but not universal, and increasingly seen as old-fashioned outside more traditional industries.
Gulf states and much of Asia: fuller personal profiles expected
The Gulf states (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) and a large part of Asia expect a fuller personal profile — photo, nationality, date of birth, sometimes visa/residency status — as standard, not exceptional. This isn't primarily a cultural preference; a lot of it is genuinely operational. Nationality and visa status directly affect whether a candidate can legally work in the country, and employers need that information early in the process, not after an offer.
Japan and South Korea: their own standardized systems
Japan and South Korea are the clearest outliers — both run structured, standardized document systems that don't map cleanly onto the free-form CV used elsewhere. Japan's rirekisho is a formal, standardized template (often literally the same printed form) covering personal history, education, and work history in a fixed format, frequently paired with a separate shokumu-keirekisho (a more detailed work-history document, closer to a Western-style CV). South Korea has its own conventions with similarly heavy standardization. If you're applying in either market, adapting a Western CV format is a much weaker starting point than using the actual local document convention.
Multinationals: internal Western norms, local hiring expectations
A pattern worth knowing if you're targeting a multinational: many adopt Western-style, personal-data-minimal norms internally (for their own HR systems and global mobility), but still expect a locally-formatted CV when hiring directly into a specific country's market. Applying to the same company's Brussels office and Dubai office through their respective local hiring processes can mean two genuinely different expected formats, even though it's one employer.
The legal frameworks doing the real work
- GDPR (EU) governs what personal data can be collected and how it's processed — relevant to any CV submitted to an EU-based employer or platform, regardless of where the applicant is from.
- EEO / Title VII (US) is the backbone of the Anglosphere's photo/personal-data avoidance — it's not that a photo is illegal to submit, it's that an employer handling one poorly creates real legal risk for themselves.
- The EU AI Act specifically classifies AI systems used to screen or rank job candidates as high-risk, with compliance obligations landing on employers using such tools — relevant well beyond just CV format, since it governs how CVs can be processed once submitted.
- South Korea's Fair Hiring Procedures Act places specific restrictions on what employers can ask candidates for during the hiring process.
This is a genuinely fast-moving area of law in several jurisdictions — treat the above as orientation, not final legal guidance for your specific situation.
The practical takeaway
If you're only ever applying within one country, follow that country's local convention — when in doubt, look at how people already working in your target company, in that country, format their own CV or LinkedIn profile. If you're applying across borders, the format that's "obviously correct" in one market can be actively counterproductive — or legally awkward for the employer — in another. Maintaining one master version of your full career data, and generating a locally-appropriate CV from it per market, is a very different (and much less error-prone) approach than manually maintaining several hand-edited versions and hoping you remember which one goes where.
Related guides
- Why there's no universal CV format — the standards side of the same fragmentation