English CV for Israeli hi-tech: what to change and cut

An English CV for Israeli hi-tech is not a translation of the Hebrew one. Three things change: delete the photo, ID number, age and marital status; translate job titles and degrees into terms a non-Israeli reader searches for; and open every bullet with a past-tense verb and close it with a measurable result. One page under ten years' experience.

The problem with most files that go through a translator isn't the English. Every sentence is correct and the document still reads foreign, because it was built for an Israeli reader and someone else is reading it now.

CV or resume?

In the United States the word is resume, and CV is reserved almost entirely for academic roles. Purdue's writing lab says it directly: in the US a curriculum vitae is an academic document with no page limit, while a resume is one or two pages tailored to a role (checked 2 September 2026). In Britain, Europe and Israel, "CV" is just the everyday word.

In practice: for an Israeli company either word is understood. For a US company or a relocation role, write Resume. It matters most in the filename, which is what a recruiter sees in a list — Dana Levi - Backend Engineer.pdf beats CV Dana FINAL v3.pdf. Inside the document neither word belongs at the top. Your name is the heading.

Writing an English CV: where literal translation breaks

Your title is what a person scans for and what a recruiter types into a search box, and a literal translation produces a title nobody searches.

The rule behind the table: write the title the company you're applying to would advertise, not the one on your payslip. That's convention rather than law, but it's the convention the ads you're reading were written in.

Degrees. The Hebrew word בוגר translates to nothing — write the degree itself: B.Sc. for engineering and sciences, B.A. for humanities, M.Sc. / M.A. for a master's. Israeli GPAs are out of 100 and American ones out of 4.0, so GPA 88 alone reads as a typo. Write GPA 88/100.

Institution names. Copy the official English name from the institution's own site rather than from memory. The one that catches people: anyone who studied at IDC Herzliya should write Reichman University, the official name since a 2021 rename (checked 2 September 2026).

What to delete from the Hebrew version

1. A photo. It isn't the American convention, and it breaks the automated read of the file — see the format section.
2. Your ID number. No use in a hiring process, and an identifier you'd be handing to strangers.
3. Date of birth or age.
4. Marital status and number of children. The EEOC, the US federal equal employment agency, writes that questions about marital status and the number and ages of children are frequently used to discriminate against women and may violate Title VII (checked 2 September 2026). An American employer isn't supposed to ask; you don't need to answer in advance.
5. A full home address. Tel Aviv, Israel is enough, and it answers the time-zone question in a remote role.

What stays, and gets deleted by mistake: languages. Hebrew (native), English (fluent) is real information, and for a role based in Israel native Hebrew is sometimes a genuine requirement.

English CV for Israeli hi-tech: what to add

Three sections a hi-tech CV carries and a general one doesn't, all so someone can find you in a search.

• Technologies in exact names. PostgreSQL, not SQL databases. Kubernetes, not container orchestration. Split into short categories — Languages, Cloud, Data — not one long comma list.
• One clickable link — GitHub, an English LinkedIn profile, a portfolio. Write the address out as text (github.com/danalevi): if the file is read as stripped text, a hidden link disappears.
• Seniority in the title. Senior Backend Engineer, not Backend Engineer, if that was the level. In English that's part of the job title, not bragging.

What not to add: an Objective section, and soft skills with nothing behind them. Team player is a claim nobody can check; a bullet describing a team you led is evidence.

English CV for Israeli military service

Write it like any other role — title, what you did, at what scale. Not like a codename.

An Israeli reader knows what a unit number means. A reader in San Francisco doesn't, and won't go looking. What they do see is three unbroken years between school and a degree, and without a proper heading those years look like a hole in the timeline.

• Translate the substance, not the label. Sergeant alone says nothing; Led a team of 8 across three shifts does. Rank is internal information, scope is what travels.
• Write it as a role with dates, in the same format as the rest of your experience, under Experience if it's relevant.
• Spell the organisation out once: Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Not Tzahal.
• A unit number without an explanation fails both ways — meaningless abroad, and sometimes information you shouldn't publish. Technology unit, IDF followed by a line on what you built is what gets read.
• Old and irrelevant service is one line under Additional, not a section.

When you can't say what you did. In a classified role you can't write the content, and that's fine. You can write the function, the scale and the tools: Built and maintained a distributed data pipeline in a classified environment; team of 6, 24/7 operation reveals nothing and tells a recruiter what she needs.

Before you write security clearance: for a US role that phrase means a US clearance, a different process, and an Israeli clearance doesn't transfer into it. Top Secret clearance on a CV going to an American company reads as a claim you can't back. Served in a classified role (Israel) is the accurate version. Practice rather than a formal rule — but it's the reading an American recruiter brings with them.

Reserve duty and gaps. If several months are missing because of reserve duty, one line beats an unexplained gap: a foreign reader won't fill it in, and does read dates. IDF reserve duty — 2024, 5 months on its own line is enough. Don't make it a section, and don't write Miluim.

This is practice, not research: there's no figure for how many foreign recruiters understand IDF structure and we didn't find one. What is checkable is that the popular Israeli guides don't touch the question — TechMonster's guide (updated 29 January 2024, checked 2 September 2026) covers structure, verbs and terminology, and says nothing about military service.

Bullets that prove instead of describe

Every experience line opens with a past-tense verb and ends in a result. Translation breaks it the same way every time: the Hebrew sentence starts with the role ("responsible for the CI infrastructure") and the translation keeps the order, producing a job spec instead of a record of what you did.

Before: Responsible for the CI infrastructure and improving build times.

After: Cut CI build time from 22 to 6 minutes by parallelizing the test suite across 4 runners; unblocked ~30 daily deploys.

• Verb first, past tense: Built, Led, Migrated, Cut, Shipped, Owned. Not Was responsible for, not Worked on.
• One number per line, where a number exists — percentage, time, volume, team size.
• Where there's no number, write the scope. Rewrote the billing service used by every customer-facing product is more measurable than Improved the billing service.

Don't invent the number. If you don't know what it saved, write what you changed and for whom.

English CV format: what the system actually reads

The file is read twice — once by recruiting software that breaks it into fields, once by a person. The first read is the one that fails silently.

This is one of the few points here with documentation from the source. Greenhouse, a recruiting system many Israeli hi-tech companies run, publishes what makes a resume fail to parse (updated 2 March 2026, checked 2 September 2026): graphics, photos or word art; a file uploaded as an image rather than a document; tables, headers and footers; contact details inside a header or text box; and a columned layout. Files over 2.5MB aren't parsed either. The formats it reads are doc, docx, pdf, rtf and txt.

That's one vendor's documentation and Greenhouse isn't the only system in the market — but it's the company documenting what breaks its own parser, which is as close to primary as this subject gets. What follows: a PDF exported from a text editor rather than a scan (two-second test — open it and try to select a line; if it doesn't highlight, it's an image), one column rather than a sidebar template, contact details in the body's first lines instead of the header, no tables or icons, and no photo.

One page or two: one page up to roughly ten years of experience, two above. Purdue defines the American resume as one or two pages. There's a real disagreement here — AllJobs' Hebrew guide writes that English CVs are conventionally longer and two pages are fine (no publication date on the page; checked 2 September 2026). Both are right in context: a European CV is longer, an American resume isn't. Where you're applying decides.

US or UK spelling: pick one and be consistent. optimize or optimise, color or colour — mixing them on one page is what reads as careless, not the choice. To choose without guessing, read a paragraph of the company's careers page, then set your spell-checker to match.

English CV writing service: when it's worth paying

It's worth paying when your document is weak on its own merits, or when you're going after a small number of jobs that really matter. Not when the only problem is the English, and not if you're applying to three roles a week — a writing service sells you one document, and every further version is a new order.

Prices checked 2 September 2026 on each service's own site, and linked to it.

The row worth rereading is the first. Chat is the best tool on the list for phrasing, and the only one that will invent an achievement and write it with total confidence. If you run your CV through it, read every line that comes back and ask whether it's true — not whether it sounds good.

What to do now

1. Delete the photo, ID number, date of birth, marital status and full address.
2. Fix titles and degrees using the tables above, and copy your institution's name from its own English site.
3. Rewrite five experience bullets — verb first, one number. Five, not all of them.
4. Export a PDF, open it, try to select a line. If it doesn't highlight, start again from a text file.
5. Tailor that version to the specific job. We've written about why that matters and why it still isn't enough — the tailored file still goes into an online form alongside everyone else's, and what gets it out of there is someone inside.

Steps 1 to 4 are one evening's work. Step 5 comes back with every new job, and in the comparison of Israeli job-search tools we wrote that every tool in the market stops exactly there. That's why we built Tagishoti: it takes the CV you already have and tailors it to each job separately, out of what's written in it — it doesn't invent experience, skills or achievements that weren't there.

What it doesn't do, to be clear: it isn't a translation service. The first English version still has to be written by someone — you, or a human writer.