Resume in English: turning a Latin American CV into a US resume

If you learned to write a CV in Latin America and you are now applying to US companies, the document you have is not the document they expect. A US resume runs to one page, carries no photo, no national ID, no marital status and no date of birth, and it uses the exact words the company wrote into the posting. That last part decides whether you clear the filter, and it is the part that disappears when a CV is translated word for word. This guide covers what changes, how a US resume is structured, and the translation mistake that sinks otherwise strong candidates.

Resume and CV are two different documents in the US

In Spanish, currículum, CV and hoja de vida all mean the same piece of paper. In the United States they do not:

• Resume: one page, for any job at a company. This is the one you need.
• CV (curriculum vitae): long, with publications and conferences. Academia and research only.

Send a three-page "CV" to a company role in the US and you have started badly. In the UK and Ireland, CV does mean the ordinary document, so let the country of the posting decide.

What comes off the page

A Latin American CV usually carries information that a US resume leaves out, and often must leave out:

This is not a style preference. Many US employers have non-discrimination policies that prevent them from considering age, gender or nationality, and a document carrying that information complicates their process. Some teams discard the file before reading it.

What you add instead: your city and country (useful for remote roles, because time zone overlap matters), your LinkedIn, and a languages line with your real level.

The US resume structure

One column, top to bottom, with English section headings. The software looks for those names, so use the standard ones rather than inventing something:

• Header. Name, city and country, phone with country code, email, LinkedIn. Nothing else.
• Professional summary. Two or three lines: what you are, how long you have been doing it, what you can do, written in the words of the posting.
• Experience. One line per role with title, company, city and dates, then two or three achievement bullets.
• Education. Degree, university, city, year.
• Skills. Comma-separated, using the exact names of the tools.
• Languages. Your real English level, on the scale used there.

Dates go in English and abbreviated, Jan 2023 - Present, not 01/2023. Reverse chronological order throughout: most recent first, in both experience and education.

The mistake that sinks strong candidates: translating literally

This is the part almost nobody explains, and it costs the most interviews.

The software screening your resume compares the words in the posting against the words in your document. It does not understand synonyms and it does not translate. If the posting asks for inventory management and you translated your role as gestión de inventarios, it does not match. You have the experience. You wrote it in the wrong words.

The most common collisions when translating from Spanish:

The working rule: do not translate your CV, rewrite it using the vocabulary of the posting you are applying to. Open the posting, pull out the nouns and tool names exactly as written, and use those. If your title was "Coordinador de Logística" and the posting wants a "Logistics Coordinator", that is the title to write, because it is the same job.

Which also means one English resume does not serve every posting. The vocabulary changes with the role. Same principle as tailoring your resume to a job description.

Achievements need a verb and a number

In English, achievements open with a past-tense verb and carry a figure:

• ❌ Responsible for the social media accounts
• ✅ Managed 4 social media accounts, growing combined following 38% in 8 months

Verbs that work: Led, Built, Reduced, Increased, Migrated, Automated, Launched, Negotiated. Avoid Responsible for, Worked on and Helped with, which describe the job rather than what you did.

If your English is not perfect

Do not hide it and do not inflate it. Put your real level under LANGUAGES using the scale they use: Basic, Conversational, Professional working proficiency, Fluent, Native. Claiming Fluent without being fluent surfaces in the first minute of an interview and costs more than the truth would have.

What does matter: the resume itself should be in correct English even if your spoken level is intermediate. The document is read before you are.

Checking your resume against the posting

Once the resume is in English, the remaining question is whether it matches the specific posting you are about to apply to. Paste the posting and upload the resume and in about 30 seconds you see your match score. To see the keywords the posting asks for that your document does not use, and the lines worth rewriting, you create a free account, no card.

Both documents go in the same language: posting in English, resume in English. If you have not built it yet, you can do that in the builder.

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