CV vs. resume: what's the difference?

The short answer: in most of the world, a CV and a resume are the same document under two different names. In the United States and Canada, they are two genuinely different documents, and using the wrong one can hurt an application.

The regional split

Outside North America, “CV” is simply the standard term for the one- to two-page application document used for the vast majority of jobs. A job listing in London or Berlin that asks for a “CV” wants exactly what a listing in New York would call a “resume.”

In the US and Canada, “CV” refers specifically to the long-form academic document used for university, research, and grant applications. It lists publications, conference talks, grants, teaching history, and professional service, and it has no length cap because completeness is the point. A resume, by contrast, is deliberately short, one page for most candidates, and focused on the handful of achievements most relevant to a specific job.

Length is the most visible difference

A resume runs one page for the majority of candidates, extending to two only with a decade or more of relevant experience. An academic CV in the US sense can run to five, ten, or fifteen pages, growing with a person’s career rather than staying fixed. We cover the reasoning behind resume length specifically in how long should a resume be.

Content differs, not just length

A resume is curated: you choose which roles, projects, and achievements to include based on relevance to the specific job, and you leave out the rest. An academic CV is closer to a comprehensive record: every publication, every grant, every talk, generally included regardless of how relevant a particular reader might find it.

This is why simply cutting a long CV down to one page rarely produces a good resume. The two documents are not different lengths of the same thing; they select and present the same underlying facts for different purposes.

Which one you should be using

If you are applying for a job outside academia, in the US, UK, or anywhere else, you want the short, curated document: call it a resume or a CV depending on the region, but write it the same way regardless of the label. If you are applying for a faculty position, postdoctoral fellowship, or research grant in the US or Canada, you want the long academic CV, and a one-page summary will look underprepared to that audience.

When a job listing’s country is ambiguous, or the listing itself does not clarify, the safest read is that a normal company job, whatever it calls the document, wants the short version.

Building the short version

For software engineers and other technical roles, most of what belongs in the short, curated resume, languages, projects, and a track record of shipped work, already exists in a public GitHub profile. resumefromgit.com reads that profile directly and generates a visual CV plus a one-page, ATS-safe PDF resume from it, so the starting draft is grounded in real repositories rather than a blank page.