The short answer
In the US and Canada, résumé means the short, targeted, one- to two-page document you send to an employer for a normal job, and CV means a long academic record that can run to many pages. In the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe, CV means that same short document, and résumé is rarely used at all. So the same two words mean opposite things depending on where you are.
The practical consequence: when someone tells you to send your CV, the document they want depends on where they are. A recruiter in Manchester means a two-page summary. A search committee in Ohio means a long list of everything you have published. Sending the wrong one tells the reader you have not understood the market you are applying into.
The comparison table
Most of the confusion comes from assuming the middle two columns agree with each other. They do not.
| Term | What it means in the US and Canada | What it means in the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia and New Zealand | Typical length | Typical purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Résumé | The standard document for any job application. A short, targeted summary of experience, education and skills. | Barely used. Some recruiters in international companies will recognise the word; most employers never see it. | One to two pages | Getting shortlisted for a specific advertised job |
| CV (curriculum vitae) | A long academic record: publications, grants, conference talks, teaching, references. Rarely used outside academia, research and some medical roles. | The standard document for any job application — the same short summary an American would call a résumé. | Two pages for a job; many pages for a US academic post | Job applications everywhere; academic appointments, fellowships and grant applications |
| Academic CV | The same long record, named precisely because "CV" alone is ambiguous. | Still a CV, but an unusually long one, and the employer expects the length. | Grows with a career: several pages at graduate level, far longer later | Faculty posts, research positions, fellowships, publication and funding decisions |
| Cover letter / covering letter | "Cover letter" is the standard term. | "Covering letter" is common in the UK and Ireland; "cover letter" is also understood. | One page | A short argument for why you fit this particular role |
In the US, a job advertisement asking for a CV is often written loosely. Many American employers use the words interchangeably and mean whichever document they have always received. Assume a résumé unless the posting clearly describes research, teaching or publications.
Why the confusion exists
The short version: the two regions kept different parts of a shared vocabulary. Curriculum vitae is Latin for "course of life". Résumé is French, from a verb meaning to summarise, and it entered North American English as the word for a career summary written for an employer.
Both words travelled, but the hiring cultures did not. North American employers, reading a great many applications, standardised on the short summary and gave it the borrowed French name. British, Irish, Australian and European employers kept the Latin term for the same short document. American academia kept the long form of the CV, which is why the word means a publications list there and nowhere else.
Where the exact shifts happened is not something this guide will guess at. What matters today is observable: the divergence is real, stable, and runs in opposite directions on the two sides of the Atlantic.
What a US academic CV actually contains
If you are applying from a British or European background to a US academic post, this is the document that catches people out. It is not a two-page CV with more detail. It is a different genre: an evidence record, meant to be exhaustive, not selective.
The sections you should expect to include:
- Education — every degree, the institution, the dates, the thesis title, and your supervisor where that is conventional in your field.
- Publications — peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, books and work in progress, each in its own list, cited in full in your field's standard style.
- Conference presentations — invited talks, papers, posters and panels, with the conference name, location and year.
- Grants and funding — what you won, from whom, for how much, and in what role, including fellowships and awards held competitively.
- Teaching experience — courses taught or assisted on, at what level, and any training or evaluation that supports it.
- References — typically three to five named people with their positions and contact details.
Depending on the field, you may also add honours, memberships, editorial or peer-review work, committee service, outreach and languages. Non-academic jobs get a short section or nothing at all — the committee is hiring a researcher, not auditing your employment history.
You need one if you are applying for academic jobs, postdoctoral or research posts, some medical and scientific roles where a credentials review expects the full record, fellowships and grant applications, and graduate programmes in the US. For an industry research role, check the posting: many want a short résumé and will find a long CV hard to read, while some senior research and clinical posts ask for the academic version.
Keep it current. An academic CV is a live document you add to continuously, and you tailor a cover letter rather than trimming the CV for each application.
Which one do I send?
Work from the employer's location, not your own, and follow the posting over this list — the posting always wins.
- Applying to a company in the UK or Ireland: send a CV. Two pages, British spelling, no photograph, and a covering letter unless the application says not to.
- Applying to a company in Australia or New Zealand: send a CV. Two to three pages is normal here, and a cover letter is still expected.
- Applying to a company in the US or Canada: send a résumé. One to two pages, tailored, American spelling, no photograph, no date of birth.
- Applying to a US academic post, postdoc, fellowship or graduate programme: send the full academic CV, however many pages it runs to.
- Applying to a company in Europe: send a CV, in the local language where the posting is, and check that country's conventions first — expected length, whether a photograph is usual, whether grades need reformatting.
- Applying somewhere that just says "send your CV": they almost always mean the short document. Two pages, plain, targeted at the posting. If they wanted publications and a teaching record they would say so.
One exception. If a recruiter in one country is handling a role in another, that recruiter is your reader for the first pass. Send the short version and keep the long one ready.
Terms that change with the region
These are the smaller words and formats that give you away.
| What you mean | US and Canada | UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand |
|---|---|---|
| The short job document | résumé | CV |
| The letter that goes with it | cover letter | covering letter |
| Your university grade average | grade point average (GPA), usually on a 4.0 scale | degree classification — first, 2:1, 2:2, third — or a percentage |
| A date | month first: 03/04/2026 is 4 March 2026 | day first: 03/04/2026 is 3 April 2026 |
| Still in the job | "Present" or "Current" | "Present", "to date" or "ongoing" |
The date format causes real damage. Write 03/04/2026 for a US employer and they read 4 March. If you meant 3 April, your employment dates now sit two months out of place, and a checker comparing them to your references sees a discrepancy you did not make. The same error runs the other way into a UK application and can make two roles look like they overlap when they never did.
The fix costs nothing: write the month as a word — "3 April 2026" or "April 2026" — wherever you are not forced into a numeric field. Where a form insists on numbers, read the format hint next to the field. And if you studied in one country and are applying in another, translate your grades: a 2:1 is roughly a strong B average, and a GPA of about 3.5 is roughly an upper second.
Two more regional points. The UK and US convention is to leave your photograph, date of birth and nationality off a job application, because it creates a discrimination risk a cautious employer will avoid; several European and many Asian and Middle Eastern employers expect some of that information. And in the US, figures on the page use a full stop as a decimal separator and a comma for thousands; in much of Europe it is the other way round.
Spelling and accents
The word has three common written forms, and one of them is simply wrong.
- résumé — two accents. The standard American spelling, and the one most readers recognise as careful.
- resume — no accents. Normal in British, Irish and Australian usage and harmless, though the unaccented word is also an English verb.
- resumé — one accent, on the final letter. Neither the French spelling nor the American one, and the one a proofreader will circle.
The rule for the document you send is not the rule for this page: use the local spelling. Applying in the US, write résumé with both accents; if the application system cannot handle accented characters, drop them entirely rather than keeping one. Applying in the UK, Ireland or Australia, the document is a CV, and the rest of the page should use British spelling: organised, programme, specialised.
A page that mixes the two conventions reads as a template, or as a document written for somewhere else. Pick one and follow it throughout.
Where Merit fits
None of the above needs a product, but if you are applying in two regions at once and need the same facts arranged two ways, Merit interviews you about your work history, keeps the confirmed facts in a private vault, and drafts a CV from that record — you confirm every fact before it is used, and you can export or delete the whole thing. One interview and one CV are free; after that it is $20 a month.