CV, resume or biodata: which one an employer means

What is the difference between a CV, a resume and a biodata?

In India, most private employers who ask for a CV or a resume mean the same thing: one or two pages about your work, your education and your skills. A biodata is a different document — a sheet of personal particulars such as date of birth, parents' names, religion and marital status, with education listed briefly — and it belongs to older government forms and to marriage proposals more than to hiring today. Abroad, the first two words separate: in the US and Canada a CV is a long academic record and a resume is the short job document, while in the UK, Ireland and most of Europe a CV is simply what a resume is called.

Which one to send

• •A private company in India, whatever the posting calls it: a resume of one page as a fresher, and two when your experience fills them.
• •A government or PSU job: the recruitment's own application form. The personal details a biodata used to carry are asked for there, in the format the form wants.
• •A university, research or medical post, in India or abroad: an academic CV — publications, conferences, grants, teaching and supervision, as long as the record is.
• •A company in the US or Canada: a resume on US Letter paper with no personal details. The guide to applying from India covers what changes.
• •A company in the UK, Ireland or elsewhere in Europe: a CV of about two pages. In the UK and Ireland it carries no photo and no date of birth; conventions on photos differ across the rest of Europe.
• •An employer in the Gulf: a CV as for the UK, with nationality and visa status added when the posting asks for them, which it often does.

What an academic CV adds

An academic CV is a complete record rather than a selection. It keeps everything a resume would cut — every publication, every conference talk, every course taught — because in academic hiring the record is the evidence, and a committee wants all of it. It still leads with the section that matters most for the post: publications for a research role, teaching for a teaching one.

• •Publications, in one consistent citation style, with your name marked in each author list.
• •Conference presentations and invited talks.
• •Grants, fellowships and scholarships, with amounts where they are public.
• •Teaching: the courses, their level, and whether you designed or delivered them.
• •Supervision and service: students guided, committees served on, reviewing for journals.

Why the personal details went

The biodata's fields — date of birth, religion, caste, marital status, father's name, height — describe the person rather than the work, and hiring has moved away from them for three reasons.

• •They invite the wrong decision. None of them says how someone will do a job, and several are exactly the grounds an employer should not decide on.
• •They cost space. Every line of particulars is a line not spent on something you did.
• •They travel. A resume is forwarded, printed, uploaded to job portals and kept in databases for years, and a date of birth, a father's name and an address together are most of what someone needs to impersonate you.

The builder has no fields for a photo, date of birth, religion or marital status, on purpose. Anything an employer genuinely needs from that list, its own form will ask for.

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