What not to put on a resume: 9 details to cut now

What personal details should you leave off your CV in 2026?

Keep your contact block to five lines: name, professional email, one phone number, city and country, and a LinkedIn profile. Everything else people habitually paste in there should go: full street address, date of birth, marital status, number of children, national ID or Social Security number, military service number, photo, religion, nationality, health status and salary history. The case for stripping those fields got a lot more concrete on 30 September 2026, when the US Department of Defense began notifying current and former personnel that intruders had spent months inside the Defense Manpower Data Center, walking out with unencrypted names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and contact details.

That breach happened in a system built to guard records. Your CV is the opposite: a document designed to be copied. A single application can put it in a company's applicant tracking system, a recruiting agency's database, a hiring manager's inbox, a shared drive and two or three job-board profiles you barely remember creating. None of those copies expire when the role is filled. So every optional field you include isn't stored once, it's stored dozens of times across systems whose security you'll never audit and whose retention policies you'll never read.

The practical test is simple. At the screening stage, a recruiter needs to know who you are, how to reach you, roughly where you're based and whether you can legally work there. Nothing else in the personal-details block moves that decision forward. Your full mailing address belongs on an onboarding form. Your date of birth belongs on a background-check consent document you sign after an offer. Your ID number belongs nowhere except an official government portal. Hold those back until there's a real employment relationship and a lawful reason to hand them over.

Volunteering details early doesn't read as thorough, it reads as inexperienced. Recruiters notice.

Why does extra personal information on a CV raise both privacy and bias risk?

Two separate risks stack up. On the privacy side, each optional field multiplies the number of copies of your identifying data sitting in systems you don't control, and a name plus date of birth plus full address plus a government ID number is close to a complete identity-theft kit. On the bias side, details like your age, marital status, photo or religion feed exactly the assumptions employment law tries to keep out of hiring decisions. You can't undo an impression a recruiter formed in the four seconds before they read your first bullet point.

The bias problem is not theoretical. Photos trigger snap judgements about age, ethnicity, gender and attractiveness, which is why many US and UK employers route CVs through anonymised screening and why some recruiting teams return photo CVs unread rather than create a paper trail for a discrimination claim. A birth year does similar damage: it lets a screener quietly age you out before your achievements register. Israeli CVs have historically carried birth year, marital status and army service dates, and that habit is fading for the same reason — it hands over information that can only be used against you.

The fraud side is where the military breach bites hardest. Once names, birth dates and Social Security numbers are circulating, criminals need only a plausible pretext to complete the picture, and a fake job advert is a very cheap pretext. Harvesting CVs through bogus listings is routine. Treat any request for an ID scan, a bank account, a passport photo page or a service number before a written offer as a red flag, and remember that a legitimate employer collects that material through a secure onboarding system, never over email or a chat app.

Should I put my address on my resume, or just my city?

City and state, or city and country for international applications, on one line in the body of the document. No house number, no street, no postcode. The full mailing address is a leftover from when CVs arrived by post, and in 2026 it buys you nothing that a city line doesn't. The two genuine exceptions: US federal applications frequently require a complete address on the application form itself, and licensed professionals should make their state or licensing jurisdiction obvious because it determines eligibility. Neither exception requires your street address in the CV document you email around.

Don't swing to the other extreme and delete location altogether. Recruiters filter on it for entirely practical reasons — commute, time zone, work authorisation, payroll jurisdiction — and a blank location field reads as an unknown rather than as neutral. Unknowns get skipped when there are four hundred applicants. If you're moving, write your current city plus a short line such as open to relocation, or relocating to Austin in March 2027. For a distributed role, pair your city with your time zone, because remote almost always still means remote within a country or an overlap window.

Bilingual CVs need one extra decision. If you're applying in Israel with a Hebrew CV or a Hebrew-and-English pair, keep the contact line to name, phone, email, city and LinkedIn in both versions, and drop the ID number, birth year, marital status and army personal number that older Hebrew templates still include. Right-to-left files are also the ones most likely to scramble in extraction, which is a separate problem worth testing with a Hebrew CV screening check before you send anything to an Israeli employer's system.

How should veterans convert a service record into a civilian CV?

Translate the record, don't transcribe it. Your service number, DoD ID or EDIPI, Social Security number, home address, dependants, date of birth, unit mailing address and the case number of your background investigation all stay off the civilian CV. What goes on is the substance a hiring manager can actually use: your rank and role in plain language, how many people you led, what budget or equipment value you were accountable for, the certifications you hold, and your clearance level and current status. The record is a personnel file. A CV is an argument.

Say the clearance the way industry says it: the level, whether it's active, and roughly when it was last adjudicated — for example, active Secret clearance, reinvestigated 2024. Never the investigation number or the docketing details. Then convert your occupational specialty into the civilian job title people actually search for, because a specialty code means nothing to a recruiter and nothing to a keyword search. Logistics NCO becomes supply chain and inventory operations. Signals work becomes network and communications infrastructure. Keep the military term in brackets once if it's a recognised credential, and otherwise write for the civilian reader.

Quantify scope without touching anything classified. Managed a 14-person maintenance team across three sites, sustained a 22-vehicle fleet at 95 percent readiness, oversaw 4 million dollars of controlled equipment with zero losses across two audits — all of that is unclassified, verifiable and far more persuasive than a duty-description paragraph lifted from an evaluation form. If you're starting from a service record rather than a civilian CV, it's usually faster to rebuild from scratch than to edit; a chat-based CV builder lets you describe the work in your own words and hands back an ATS-friendly document in a choice of templates.

How do you keep a CV parseable after stripping the personal details?

Put one clean contact line in the body of the document, in plain text, immediately under your name — not in a header, not in a footer, not in a text box, not in a table cell. Most parsers read the document body first and treat header and footer content as decoration, which means a beautifully laid-out contact block can vanish entirely and leave the system with a CV it can't route. Single column, standard section headings, real text rather than an image of text. That's the whole formula, and it survives every mainstream applicant tracking system.

Watch the small things that break during a rewrite. Deleting a field often leaves an empty label behind, so a stray Address: with nothing after it ends up parsed as a blank value or, worse, absorbs the line beneath it. Little phone and envelope glyphs from an icon font frequently extract as question marks or nothing at all, so spell out the word or drop the icon. Check your document properties too, since author metadata and an old filename can carry details you thought you removed. Name the file firstname-lastname-role.pdf and never put an ID or service number in a filename.

Then verify rather than assume, because you can't see what the parser sees by looking at your own PDF. A free CV analysis returns a score out of 100, five category scores covering experience, tech stack, impact and ownership, clarity and structure, and ATS compatibility, plus a visual layout analysis that shows how the document reads once it's been pulled apart. Here's the contrarian bit: a slightly plainer CV that extracts perfectly beats a designed one every single time, and the people who lose interviews to formatting almost never find out that's why.

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