Open almost any Indian CV and, straight after the name, there is a block of personal details. We have read more than 10,000 CVs over twenty-five years of executive search. For this page we counted how often each detail appears in a sample of 399 Indian CVs, and what each one does for the person who put it there. Short answer: nothing a recruiter shortlists on, and one of them is a risk.
Share of CVs in which our reader found each personal detail on the page. About 62 in 100 carried at least one of them, and more than half stated a date of birth.
| Date of birth | 56% | |
|---|---|---|
| Marital status | 38% | |
| Nationality | 36% | |
| Father’s name | 27% | |
| Gender | 27% | |
| Passport number | 7% | |
| Religion | 7% | |
| Mother’s name | 6% |
This is our view, and the reasoning behind it. A shortlist is built from what you have done, so each of these is worth asking one question of: what is it doing for the person reading?
It has no job to do in a shortlist. The dates of your jobs already show a recruiter how much experience you have, and that is the only part of your age that is relevant. What the date of birth adds is a number a reader can use to make a guess about you.
A government form, a passport application or a background check will ask for it, in a form. That is where it belongs.
It says nothing about how you will do the job, and it invites assumptions about availability and relocation that have nothing to do with your work. Cut it.
Your name is how you are found. Your father’s name is how a form identifies you, a habit carried over from mark-sheets and application forms. A CV is not a form. Nobody shortlists on it.
This is the one to remove today. About 7 in 100 CVs in our count carried a passport number. A CV does not stay where you sent it: it is copied into portals, forwarded between inboxes and stored in systems you will never see. An identity number belongs on a form you are submitting to someone you have chosen to trust, never on a document that travels.
The same test gives the same answer. None of them tells a reader whether you can do the work, and each one gives a reader something to read into. Nationality is the least harmful of them; where it matters for a role, such as work authorisation, say so in one line in plain words.
Keep: your name, phone number, email address, your city, and a link to your LinkedIn profile. That is everything a recruiter needs in order to reply to you. A full home address is not needed to be shortlisted.
When a form asks: fill in the form field and keep the CV clean. Some applications, government and public-sector ones in particular, do ask for these details in a particular layout. Keep that as a separate version, and send it only where it is asked for.
The photograph is the other convention on Indian CVs. It carries no text, so software reads nothing from it, and it takes space at the top of page one. Our suggestion is the same as for the details above: send the version without it to portals, and the version with it only to a person who expects one.
You do not need to. It is a convention, not a requirement, and it has no job to do in a shortlist: the dates of your jobs already show a recruiter how much experience you have. When an application form asks for your date of birth, fill in the form field and keep the CV clean.
No. It says nothing about how you will do the job and it invites assumptions about availability and relocation. Leave it off the CV, and answer it on a form only if the form asks.
No. Your father’s name is how a form identifies you, and a CV is not a form. Nobody shortlists on it, and it adds one more line of personal detail to a document that travels between inboxes and portals.
Your name, phone number, email address, city and a link to your LinkedIn profile. That is what a recruiter needs in order to reply to you. Identity numbers such as a passport number should never be on a CV.
399 Indian CVs from our reading corpus were read by our CV reader, an AI model that lists, for each CV, the personal details it finds on the page. We then counted the CVs in which each detail appeared. The table above holds counts only: no CV text, and no name or detail from any CV, is kept in it or shown here.
Three limits. It is a sample of Indian CVs, not a census, so read the shares as a picture of what is common and not as a national figure. The reader can miss a detail or see one that is not there, so treat each share as close and not exact. And a text reader cannot see a photograph, so photographs are not in the count. Passport number, religion and mother’s name each appear in fewer than 30 of the CVs, so a few CVs either way would move those shares by a point.
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