RoastMyResume

Interactive · Free · Globally roasted

Your resume
isn’t universal.

Click a country. See the photo, age, and page-length rules that make local recruiters nod — or recoil.

15 countries · hand-curated norms · one roast each

Click a highlighted country

🇺🇸

USA

United States

Locally called Résumé

Page length
1 page (2 if senior)
ATS penetration
High

Claude’s take

“The only country where 'Led cross-functional initiatives' counts as a hard skill.”

What goes on the resume

  • PhotoNever
  • Date of birthNever
  • Marital statusNever
  • NationalityNever
  • ReferencesRare
  • AddressCity only

Pinned rules

  • •No photo. Ever. Age discrimination law.
  • •One page until you're senior. Two is the ceiling.
  • •ATS-readable — no columns, no fancy graphics.
  • •Quantify every bullet or be ignored.

Sample bullets (local style)

▸Led GTM for a $40M product line; grew 3× in 18 months

▸Hired and retained 12-person team across 3 time zones

▸Reduced CAC payback period from 14 → 6 months

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Resume norms don't travel

Almost every piece of resume advice online is written for the US market and presented as universal. It isn’t. Applying abroad with a US resume gets you rejected for reasons nobody explains, because the rules differ on things Americans never think about.

The photo question

In the US, a photo on a resume is a liability — many companies discard those applications outright to avoid discrimination claims. In much of continental Europe it’s expected, and omitting it looks careless. Same document, opposite verdicts. The US case is covered separately in should you put a photo on your resume.

Personal details, and the CV/resume split

Date of birth, nationality, marital status: illegal to request in some countries, conventional in others. Length differs too — the one-page rule is a US convention, while a two- or three-page CV is standard across much of Europe and academia everywhere. The naming is its own trap, since “CV” means a short resume in the UK and a long academic record in the US. Untangled in resume vs CV.

How to use the atlas

Click a country before you apply there and check the four things that most often go wrong: photo, personal details, length, and what the document is even called. Fifteen countries, curated by hand rather than scraped. The roast for each is a joke; the norms are not.