# French CV format: what to change, with an example > Photo, one page, Bac+5, CEFR levels, the cover letter: what a US resume or UK CV must become to work in France, with a full annotated French CV example. Canonical: https://hiredfolio.com/blog/french-cv-format Published 2026-10-06 · 12 min Keywords: french cv format, resume for a job in france, cv vs resume france, french resume example, apply for a job in france Sending your American resume or British CV to a French company is not wrong, exactly. It is just read as a foreign document. The recruiter in Paris or Lyon expects a page that looks a certain way: a title under the name, a "Formation" section they can decode in one glance, a language line in a scale they trust, and very often a photo. Your "Bachelor of Arts" means little to them until it is pinned to the French ladder of Bac+3 and Bac+5, and your resume's missing cover letter is noticed more than anything it contains. This guide takes the differences in order: the three formats side by side, the French sections and their names, what to add and what to drop, how to translate your degrees and language levels, a full example to copy, and how French applicant tracking systems read what you send. If the substance of your resume needs work first, our guide to [writing an effective resume](/blog/how-to-write-an-effective-resume) is the foundation; here we only cover what changes when the country changes. ## Resume, CV, French CV: three different documents The word itself is the first trap. In the United States and Canada, the one-page document is a **resume**, and a "CV" is the multi-page academic record of a researcher. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, everyone says **CV**, but the document is far closer to the American resume than to the French one. In France, "CV" means one thing, and it has its own codes. | Criterion | US resume | UK CV | French CV | | ------------------- | ------------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------- | | Length | 1 page, 2 for a senior profile | 2 pages accepted | 1 page, 2 after roughly ten years | | Photo | Never | No | Optional, still common | | Date of birth, age | No | No | Optional, still seen | | Nationality, status | No | No | Optional; work authorisation matters if non-EU | | References | Dropped from the page | Two referees often expected at the end | Rarely asked; no references line | | Opening | Professional Summary, 2–3 lines | Personal Statement, 3–4 lines | A job title, then a 2–3 line "accroche" | | Cover letter | Optional, often unread | Expected when the posting asks | Expected, still read | | Paper, dates | Letter, March 3, 2022 | A4, 3 March 2022 | A4, 03/03/2022 | | Interests | Rare | Short, optional | A "Centres d'intérêt" line is normal | Why the French CV still carries a photo and sometimes an age: French anti-discrimination law forbids hiring decisions based on either, but it does not forbid candidates from offering the information, and habit has been slower to change than in the English-speaking world. Nobody will reject your CV for not having a photo. Some recruiters will notice its absence in fields where it remains the norm — sales, hospitality, client-facing roles — and think nothing of it in tech, finance or research. ### What French law says, word for word Two articles of the Code du travail set the frame, and neither is about the CV's layout. [Article L1221-6](https://code.travail.gouv.fr/code-du-travail/l1221-6) limits what a recruiter may ask: « Les informations demandées, sous quelque forme que ce soit, au candidat à un emploi ne peuvent avoir comme finalité que d'apprécier sa capacité à occuper l'emploi proposé ou ses aptitudes professionnelles. » The information requested from a candidate may only serve to assess whether they can do the job, and it must have « un lien direct et nécessaire » with it. [Article L1132-1](https://code.travail.gouv.fr/code-du-travail/l1132-1) then lists the grounds on which no one may be « écartée d'une procédure de recrutement », among them age, family situation, physical appearance, place of residence and belonging to a nation. Two consequences for your CV: - **The photo, your age, your family situation and your nationality are yours to offer.** A recruiter cannot use them to decide, so leaving them out costs you nothing legally. Including them is a matter of local habit, not obligation. - **Your right to work is a different kind of information.** Whether you can legally take the job bears directly on your capacity to occupy it, so it is a fair question, and the one a French recruiter reading a foreign CV most needs answered. Answer it before they ask. The reflex to keep: you are not translating your resume, you are producing a version of it for another market. The substance is the same; the form and the labels change. ## The sections of a French CV, and their names A French recruiter and a French ATS both expect the standard headings, in French, in roughly this order. If the posting is in French, write the whole CV in French. If the posting is in English — common in tech and at international companies in Paris — you can keep the content in English and still follow the French layout. 1. **En-tête** (header, usually untitled) — first name and surname, the surname often in capitals (Camille DURAND), city and country, phone in international format, email, LinkedIn. Optional: photo, age, nationality, driving licence ("Permis B"). 2. **Titre** — the job title you are applying for, taken from the posting, on its own line under your name: "Chef de projet digital", "Data Analyst". A French CV with no title looks unfinished. 3. **Accroche** or **Profil** — two or three lines, no heading: your profession, years of experience, one quantified proof, what you are looking for. The American summary, slightly shorter. 4. **Expérience professionnelle** — reverse-chronological: title, company (with a word of context if it is unknown in France), city, dates, then three to five result bullets. Name the contract type when it helps: CDI is a permanent contract, CDD a fixed-term one, "stage" an internship, "alternance" a work-study programme. 5. **Formation** — degrees, most recent first, each with its French equivalence (see below). Above experience for a junior candidate; below it, and shorter, after five years. 6. **Compétences** — tools, methods and technical skills, as plain text. This is where the posting's exact vocabulary must appear. 7. **Langues** — every language with a CEFR level; your native language marked "langue maternelle". 8. **Centres d'intérêt** — one line, and expected, unlike in the US. It opens the interview conversation, so be specific: "marathon (Paris 2025, 3h42)" says more than "sport". What disappears: "References available upon request", the word "Resume" at the top, the second page if you have under ten years of experience, and the "Personal Statement" label. ## What to add, what to drop, what to reformat **Add a title and an accroche** if your resume opens straight into experience. **Add your work authorisation** if you are not an EU citizen — and since Brexit, British candidates are not: "titre de séjour, autorisé à travailler en France" or "visa de travail en cours", in the header line. A recruiter who cannot tell whether hiring you means sponsoring a permit often files the CV rather than asks. **Drop the references and the second page.** Keep the interests line, but make it earn its place. **Decide on the photo.** If you include one: a recent head-and-shoulders shot, neutral background, dressed as you would for the interview, top right of the page. If you leave it out, leave the space out too — an empty frame looks like a mistake. **Reformat the small things**, because they are what make a document look foreign: - **Dates.** Day/month/year: 03/04/2022 is 3 April, not 4 March. For job dates, month and year in words is safest: "mars 2022 – aujourd'hui". French month names take no capital. - **Phone.** International format, with your country code: +1 617 555 0134, +44 7700 900123. - **Numbers.** Decimal comma and a space for thousands: 3,5 %, 12 000 clients, 1,2 M€. Keep figures in their original currency, with a euro conversion when the order of magnitude matters: "budget de 400 k$ (environ 370 k€)". - **Paper.** A4, not Letter. A Letter-size PDF printed on A4 loses its bottom margin, and some French recruiters still print. - **The file name.** prenom-nom-poste.pdf, no spaces, no "final_v3". ## Translating your qualifications This is where a French recruiter decides whether they understand you. Two areas concentrate almost all of the confusion. ### Degrees: Bac+3, Bac+5, Grande École, BTS and BUT France measures higher education in years after the Baccalauréat, the national exam taken at 18. A recruiter reads "Bac+3" or "Bac+5" faster than any foreign degree name, so give the French level first, then your actual degree. - **High school diploma, A-levels** → "équivalent Baccalauréat". Only worth a line in your first two years of work. - **Associate degree, HND** → "Bac+2, équivalent BTS". The BTS is a two-year vocational diploma; the BUT, its three-year cousin taught at university institutes, is Bac+3. - **Bachelor's degree** (BA, BSc, BEng) → "Bac+3, équivalent Licence" for a three-year UK degree; a four-year US bachelor's is usually written "Bac+4". Do not write "Licence" alone: the recruiter wants the level. - **Master's degree** (MA, MSc) → "Bac+5, Master". This is the level most French graduate postings ask for, so make it visible. An MBA keeps its name. - **Doctorate** → "Bac+8, Doctorat". - **Engineering degree** → "équivalent diplôme d'ingénieur" only for a five-year degree; in France the title is protected and carries Bac+5. Two French concepts you will meet in postings: a **Grande École** is a selective business or engineering school entered by competitive exam, and "diplômé d'une Grande École" is a filter some employers apply — you cannot claim it, but "University of Edinburgh, one of the UK's top 5 universities" gives the recruiter the equivalent signal. **Alternance** is a paid work-study contract; an apprenticeship or co-op programme goes under experience, named as such. Grades do not travel either. A GPA or a 2:1 means nothing to most French readers: drop it, or translate the meaning — "major de promotion", "top 10 % de la promotion" — if the comparison is honest. ### Languages: CEFR levels, and what "courant" really means French recruiters read the Common European Framework (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) and trust it more than any adjective. The adjectives still appear in postings, though, so you need to know how France reads them. France Travail, the French public employment service, pins them to the scale on its page about [assessing your level in a foreign language](https://www.francetravail.fr/candidat/vos-recherches/bien-vous-organiser/comment-evaluer-sa-maitrise-des.html): « le niveau B2 correspond à ce qu'on appelle “anglais courant” », the ability to understand and express yourself fluently, while C1 and C2, usually reached after many months living in the country, are « le fameux “anglais bilingue” ». The page is about English, but the scale is the same for every language, French included. That is one level lower than some of the English-language guides ranking for this topic, which label "courant" C1. Two consequences: - **« Français courant » in a posting asks for a B2:** someone who can hold a discussion and argue a point at work, not a near-native speaker. If you hold a B2, you meet it, and you can say so: "Français — courant (B2, DELF B2 2025)". - **« Bilingue » asks for C1 or above.** Do not write it for a B2, however comfortable you feel. Write the CEFR level every time, with the word beside it if you like, and a dated certificate if you have one: "Anglais — langue maternelle", "Espagnol — B1". A B1 candidate who writes "courant" is found out in the first phone call, and the credibility of the whole CV goes with it. A B1 written honestly, with a note that you are taking classes, is read as a plan. ## A full French CV example, annotated Here is a one-page CV for an American candidate applying to a Paris scale-up whose posting was in English. The layout, the order and the labels are French; the content is in English because the working language is. For a French-language posting, the same document is written in French.

The full CV an American product designer, a role in Paris

En-tête

Emily CARTER

Paris 11e · +1 617 555 0134 · emily.carter@email.com · linkedin.com/in/emilycarter · 29 ans · US citizen, work permit obtained (passeport talent) · photo top right

Titre

Senior Product Designer

Accroche

Product designer with 6 years in B2B SaaS, most recently owning the onboarding flow of a 40,000-user platform (activation up 28 % in a year). Working French (B2), looking to join a product team based in Paris.

Expérience

Senior Product Designer — Northwind Analytics (B2B data platform, 250 employees), Boston, USA · mars 2022 – aujourd'hui

  • Redesigned the onboarding flow with 2 engineers and a PM, raising 30-day activation from 41 % to 69 %.
  • Built and documented the design system (120 components, Figma) now used by 4 product squads.
  • Ran 60+ user interviews a year and turned them into a quarterly research digest read by the leadership team.

Product Designer — Beacon Health (telehealth start-up), Boston, USA · septembre 2019 – février 2022

  • Shipped the patient mobile app from first sketch to 4.7-star App Store rating (12 000 reviews).
  • Cut appointment-booking drop-off 35 % by reducing the flow from 7 screens to 3.

UX Design Intern (stage de 6 mois) — Boston Globe Media, Boston, USA · janvier 2019 – juin 2019

  • Prototyped and tested the paywall redesign adopted for the 2019 subscription relaunch.
Formation

Bac+5 — Master of Fine Arts in Interaction Design, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), USA, 2019

Bac+4 — Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design, University of Vermont, USA, 2017

Compétences

Figma, design systems, prototypage, user research, tests utilisateurs, accessibilité (WCAG 2.2), HTML/CSS (notions), Maze, Amplitude, Jira

Langues

Anglais — langue maternelle · Français — B2 (DELF B2, 2025, cours hebdomadaires en cours) · Espagnol — A2

Centres d'intérêt

Semi-marathon de Paris 2026 (1h52) · céramique · bénévolat Tech for Good Boston (ateliers design pour associations, 2021–2024)

One page, A4. The title sits under the name, the age and the permit status answer the two questions a French recruiter asks first, each degree carries its Bac+ level before its American name, the internship is written as a job with the French word beside it, the French level is stated as B2 with a certificate rather than as "fluent", and the interests line is specific enough to open a conversation.

The line that matters most to a French recruiter reading a foreign CV is the header: where you are, whether you can legally work, and how well you speak French. Say all three in one line and the rest of the page gets read. ## The cover letter is not optional In France the "lettre de motivation" is still part of the application. Postings ask for it, application forms have a field for it, and a CV sent alone to a French company reads as a half-finished application, especially for junior roles and outside tech. It is shorter than an American cover letter — three or four paragraphs, one page — and more formal: "Madame, Monsieur," to open, a closing formula rather than "Best regards", and a tone one notch more reserved than you would use in New York. Write it in the language of the posting. Our guide to [cover letter structure, with a worked example](/blog/cover-letter-structure-example) gives the paragraph-by-paragraph plan; it transposes directly, with the formal salutation and closing added. ## French ATS: the same rules, another vocabulary The screening software French companies use — Workday, SmartRecruiters, Taleo and the same players as everywhere else — behaves exactly as we describe in our guide to [passing ATS filters](/blog/ats-resume-filters): it extracts your text, compares it to the posting and ranks. The technical rules do not change: one column, standard headings, contact details in the body rather than the file header, a text-based PDF, full dates. A photo placed as an image is fine; a photo inside a table that breaks the column is not. What changes is the vocabulary being searched. Three checks before you send: - **The job title.** The software looks for the posting's title, not your translation of it. Many French postings use the English title ("Product Designer", "Data Analyst") even when the rest is in French; take whichever the posting uses, exactly. - **Accents and French spellings.** Keyword search is literal. If the posting says "développeur", "gestion de projet" or "comptabilité", write it with the accents — a missing accent is a different string to some parsers. - **The French labels for your level.** "Bac+5", "anglais courant", "Permis B", "CDI" are searchable terms recruiters actually type. If they are true of you, they belong on the page in those words. ### What our matcher saw when an English CV met a French posting To see what language alone costs, we ran the keyword comparison inside HiredFolio's ATS checker on a condensed version of the example CV above, in two versions, against twelve terms a French product-design posting could ask for: Product Designer, Figma, design system, UX design, tests utilisateurs, accessibilité, prototypage, anglais, français, Bac+5, gestion de projet, Permis B. We fixed the term list ourselves; in the live checker the terms are extracted from the posting you paste. - **The English version matched 8 of the 12 terms (67 %).** Some English words found their French equivalents, because the matcher keeps a list of them: "English" counted for « anglais », "French" for « français », "Master" for « Bac+5 », "project manager" for « gestion de projet ». Three did not: "usability testing", "accessibility" and "prototyping". "French" only counts since we added it to that list on October 5, 2026; before that, the word a French recruiter most needs to see from a foreign candidate was reported missing, and an ATS without such a list will still miss it. - **The French version, with every accent stripped the way a careless PDF export strips them, matched 11 of 12 (92 %).** Only Permis B, which the candidate does not hold, stayed missing. Our matcher removes accents on both sides before comparing, so "accessibilite" still met « accessibilité ». The lesson is not that accents are optional. Our matcher forgives a lost accent; do not count on every ATS doing the same, and write them. The lesson is that an English CV sent to a French posting gives away every term a matcher has not been taught to translate. The rest of the method is the one you already know: read the posting, pull out the eight to twelve terms that describe the need, and place them in the title, the accroche and the first three bullets. ## Translating your CV, then reviewing it Whoever produces the French version (you, a colleague or a machine translation tool), the same four things need a human pass, because no translation makes them for you: - **Degrees.** No tool knows that your four-year bachelor's should read "Bac+4", or that your college diploma is closer to a BTS than to a Licence. Rewrite the Formation section by hand with the equivalences above. - **Language levels.** Translation turns "fluent French" into « français courant », which France Travail reads as B2. That is accurate if B2 is your level and a problem if it is not. Either way, put the CEFR level and your certificate beside the word. - **The format.** Adding a title, deciding on the photo, stating your work authorisation, switching to A4 and French dates: these are decisions, not translations. - **The posting's words.** Translation produces good generic French; the posting wants a specific vocabulary, and the test above shows what an untranslated term costs. Once the French version is tailored, the [free ATS check](/ats-checker) compares it to the posting and lists the missing terms. It works in French as well as in English. For the lettre de motivation, HiredFolio translates a cover letter between English and French from the letter itself, as a separate copy linked to the original, and translation does not use an AI action. Translate, then rewrite the salutation and the closing formula in the French formal register yourself. Finally, have a French speaker read the CV, or at the very least read it aloud. Translated phrasing is easier to hear than to see.

Key takeaways before you apply in France

01

Keep it to one page on A4, add a job title under your name, and state your location, work authorisation and French level in the header.

02

Write every degree with its Bac+ level first, and every language with its CEFR level and a dated certificate. France Travail reads « courant » as B2 and « bilingue » as C1 or above.

03

Send a lettre de motivation with the CV, and use the posting's exact French terms, accents included, in your title and first bullets.

The next step takes two minutes: check your French CV against the posting you are targeting.

## Read next - [The best free ATS resume checkers: 2026 comparison](https://hiredfolio.com/blog/free-ats-resume-checkers) - [Is a Canva resume really ATS friendly?](https://hiredfolio.com/blog/canva-resume-ats) - [Resumes and ATS in 2026: the complete guide to getting past the filters](https://hiredfolio.com/blog/ats-resume-filters)