CV or resume? Applying in English in Germany

You have a resume that has worked for years. You send it to a German employer and hear nothing back. The problem is rarely your experience. The Lebenslauf (the German CV) is a different document with different expectations, and a recruiter here reads it looking for exactly the things your resume was trained to leave out. This is the culture layer on top of the complete CV guide: what changes when you cross the border, in both directions.

01CV, resume, Lebenslauf: three words, three documents

In the US and Canada a resume is the everyday application document, one or two pages, tailored to the role, while a CV means the long academic record with publications and teaching. In the UK, Ireland and Australia that everyday document is called a CV and nobody expects a publication list.

Germany adds a third meaning. The Lebenslauf is a tabular, reverse chronological record of your career, and when a German ad asks for a "CV" it means exactly that. When an ad asks for Bewerbungsunterlagen, it wants the full set: an Anschreiben (the cover letter), the Lebenslauf, and Zeugnisse (your certificates and employer references) as attachments. Send only a CV where the whole set was requested and you look like someone who skimmed the ad.

The rule is the same everywhere: use the word the ad uses, and follow the conventions of the country the job sits in, not the country of the headquarters. A Munich office of an American group hires under German employment law and reads German-style documents.

02What a German Lebenslauf keeps that your resume dropped

Most of the surprises are things you were taught to remove:

• A photo. Still common, top right of the first page, and taken by a photographer rather than cropped from a holiday picture. It is optional, not required.
• Date of birth. Widely included, and its absence is noticed more than it would be in London or New York.
• Full postal address. Street, postcode, city. City and country alone can look like you are hiding a commute.
• Place, date and signature. Many Lebenslauf templates end with a signed line. Not legally required, but expected often enough to be worth doing.
• A gap-free timeline. Every month between school and today should be accounted for. Quietly skipping two years is the fastest way to invite an uncomfortable question.
• Nationality and marital status. Voluntary, increasingly left out, entirely your call.

None of this is a legal obligation. The Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, the German equal treatment act, forbids discrimination on grounds of age, origin, gender and more, which is precisely why nothing in that list is mandatory. Tradition, not law, keeps the photo alive, and the debate about it is covered in the photo question.

What German employers expect less of is the personal summary. It is accepted now, and a good one still helps, but a Lebenslauf without it is perfectly normal.

03Section by section: what changes in practice

Header. Name, full address, phone with the German country code, email, and optionally a LinkedIn or Xing profile. Photo top right if you use one.

Berufserfahrung. Reverse chronological, most recent first. Per entry: job title, employer, city, and a date range written as MM/YYYY. Keep the achievement bullets you already write, they land well here too.

Ausbildung. Your degree, the institution, the years. Add one bracket explaining the level for anything that is not obvious in Germany, and check anabin, the official database run by the German education ministries, for how your qualification is classified here.

Kenntnisse und Sprachen. Tools, systems, methods, plus languages by CEFR level. German recruiters read B2 and C1 fluently and trust them more than words like "conversational". State your German level honestly and early, it is often the first thing anyone looks for.

Length. Two pages is standard and unremarkable. The American instinct to compress everything onto one page works against you here.

Templates that follow this structure without the fiddling are at our CV templates, and if you want to browse by profession, the German-language template catalogue lists hundreds of job-specific starting points.

04Action verbs still win, but German nouns matter

Everything you know about strong bullets applies. Start with a verb, name a result, keep it short. Plenty of German CVs are still lists of duties, which means a well-written achievement bullet stands out rather than looking foreign.

Two adjustments are worth making. First, keep German terms for German systems and processes, even in an otherwise English document. Nobody searches an applicant tracking system for "travel expense accounting" when the word in the building is Reisekostenabrechnung. The same goes for DATEV, Warenwirtschaft, Kurzarbeit and Betriebsrat. How that decides whether you get found at all is covered in how ATS software reads your CV.

Second, dial down the superlatives. "World-class", "rockstar" and "passionate about disrupting" read as noise to a German hiring manager, who will instead look for a number, a system name or a scope that can be checked. Understatement is not modesty here, it is credibility.

05Translation traps in the other direction

• Grades. The German scale runs from 1.0 as the best to 4.0 as a pass, the reverse of a US GPA. A 2:1 or a 3.7 GPA needs half a line of explanation, or it will be read wrongly.
• Job titles. Titles inflate faster in English than in German. A "Vice President" at a mid-sized Mittelstand company sounds odd, while Teamleiter or Abteilungsleiter is instantly understood. Add the team size if the title alone undersells you.
• Dates. Write 03/2022 or March 2022, never 03/04/2022. The day-month order differs on each side of the Atlantic, and a date nobody can decode looks like carelessness.
• References. "References available on request" means nothing here. What counts is an Arbeitszeugnis (your written employer reference), which German employers are obliged to issue and which candidates attach as a PDF.
• Company context. Keep the company name, add a short clause. "A UK high-street retailer" tells a German reader more than a brand they have never heard of.
• College and university. In German, Hochschule and Universität are distinct, and "college" translates badly. Name the institution and its type.

If you are unsure whether something reads clearly, hand your Lebenslauf to a German colleague and ask what they would want explained. Every question marks a place where a recruiter will hesitate.

06When English is the right choice

English works when the ad is written in English, when the job title itself is English, when the team language is English, or when you are applying to a research group, a startup or a tech company with an international staff. In those cases an English CV is not a compromise, it is the expected document.

German is expected almost everywhere else: the Mittelstand, the public sector, healthcare, education, anything customer-facing outside the big cities. If the ad is in German, the recruiter will read an English CV as a signal about your German rather than about your work.

There is a middle path that costs little. Keep both versions maintained, built from the same career data, and switch conventions rather than retyping content. Then the language of your application is a decision you make per job, not a constraint you live with.