Tailor Your CV to Any Job Description

The two words describe the same document in some countries and completely different documents in others. In the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, a CV is the ordinary one-to-two page document you attach to an application. In the United States and Canada, that document is called a resume, and a CV means something else entirely — a long academic record listing publications, grants, and teaching history.

This matters when you apply across markets. A British candidate sending a “CV” to a US employer is understood, but a US employer asking for a CV may genuinely want the academic version. The reliable rule is to use whichever word the advert uses, and to size the document to the market you are applying into.

Applicant tracking systems compare text literally. A posting that asks for someone who has organised a programme and specialised in a discipline is not guaranteed to register the American organized and specialized as matches for those same requirements.

So when the advert is written in British or Australian English, your CV should be too — consistently, not in patches. These are the pairs that come up most often in job adverts:

MatchCV reads the advert’s own spelling and keeps your CV consistent with it, so you are not manually diffing two dialects on every application.