How to write a German CV (Lebenslauf)

What a German employer expects to receive

A package, not a document. The single biggest difference between applying in Germany and applying in Britain or North America is that a German application is a set of documents assembled in a conventional order: the cover letter first, then the tabular CV, then the photograph, then your certificates and employer references. Sending a bare CV where a package is expected is the mistake most foreign applicants make, and it reads as an incomplete application rather than a concise one.

For an email application, convert each part to PDF and merge the whole set into one combined file, in that order. For a portal, upload the parts separately into the fields it provides and do not merge them, because a portal that asks for four uploads is going to route them to four places.

Two optional components are worth knowing about so you can recognise them rather than feel obliged to produce them: a Deckblatt, a cover sheet carrying your name, the role and your photograph, and a Motivationsschreiben, a longer motivation letter sometimes called the third page. Neither is required, and neither is expected for an entry-level application.

The photo: customary, not required, and what an employer may ask of you

A photograph on a German CV is no longer mandatory and is still usual in many industries. That single sentence settles both of the overreaches you will read elsewhere. It is not compulsory, so nobody can reject you for omitting it as a matter of rule, and it is not forbidden, so the pages telling you a photo is illegal in Germany or banned by data protection law are simply wrong.

The law here is worth stating precisely, because the confusion is expensive. German discrimination law names the grounds an employer may not decide on: ethnic origin, sex, religion or belief, disability, age, and sexual identity. It does not require a photograph and it does not ban one. What it does is put the employer at risk, because a photograph can evidence a protected characteristic and an employer who has seen one has a harder time showing a decision was unrelated to it. That risk sits on their side of the table, not yours. Data protection law bites in a different place again, on how long an employer may keep your application and when they must delete it.

If you include one, the quality expectation is real. A studio portrait is the norm; a phone selfie and a plain passport photo both read as not having tried. Placement is settled by convention: on the Deckblatt if you use one, otherwise at the top of the Lebenslauf. If you would rather not include one, the honest position is that you are within convention and that some traditional employers will notice.

One thing to be careful about: Germany, Austria and Switzerland are three markets, not one. This page describes German practice. Do not assume the Austrian or Swiss expectation on photographs and cover letters is the same, because it is not, and treating the three as a single convention is the mistake most guides make.

Personal details a German CV includes that others leave out

This is where Germany runs opposite to the markets most English-language advice is written for. A Lebenslauf conventionally carries your date of birth and your place of birth, listed as ordinary contents rather than as an unusual disclosure. British practice leaves date of birth off the page, and North American practice omits it as a matter of course, so an applicant arriving from either will have been trained to strip out exactly what a German reader expects to see.

Several other details are genuinely optional, and knowing which is the useful part. Family details and nationality are voluntary. Religion goes on the page only if the employer asks for it. Details of your parents' occupations used to be normal and are no longer expected, so a template that asks for them is an old template. A disability belongs on the page only where it affects the work you would be doing.

• Expected: full name, address, telephone number, email address, date of birth, place of birth.
• Voluntary: marital and family status, nationality.
• Only if asked: religion.
• Only if it affects the work: a disability.
• No longer expected: your parents' occupations.
• Never: a tax identification number, a social security number, or bank details.

Form, length, and the gap rule

The document is a tabellarischer Lebenslauf, a tabular CV: dated entries in a clean two-column table of period and content, not a prose narrative. One to two A4 pages is the stated norm, and reverse chronological order is standard, beginning with the most recent entry. The older forward-chronological form that started at primary school is a historical curiosity now and marks a document as out of date.

The rule with no British or North American equivalent is the gap rule: a German reader expects the dated timeline to be continuous, so a break that another market would pass over without comment is expected to carry its own line here. Parental leave, a period of unemployment, illness, a sabbatical or a long job search all get a dated entry rather than being left as silence in the timeline. This runs against the instinct a foreign applicant usually arrives with, which is to make gaps invisible, and in Germany an unexplained gap simply becomes the first question rather than a fact nobody noticed.

The formatting expectations are conservative and easy to meet: single column, one legible typeface, real headings, consistent date formatting, and a plain reverse-chronological order for both work and education. A designed two-column layout with sidebars and icons is a worse document here for the same reason it is a worse document anywhere, and it also breaks the tabular convention the reader is scanning for.

Place, date and signature

Signing a Lebenslauf is conventional and it is not strictly necessary, which is a more useful answer than the flat rule you will find elsewhere. The reason to do it is specific: a place, the current date and a signature at the foot of the document show that this version is current and that you are standing behind what it says. That is a small, cheap piece of credibility, and it costs a line.

Practically, put the city and the date on one line at the bottom, with your signature underneath. For a digital application, a scanned or drawn signature image is normal and nobody expects a certificate-backed digital signature. Do not let anyone tell you a German CV must be signed, because it need not be; do let the convention nudge you into doing it, because the date is the part that carries the value.

The Anschreiben, the Zeugnisse, and the Arbeitszeugnis

The Anschreiben, the cover letter, remains the standard first component of a German application and is expected to be written for the specific role rather than adapted from a stock paragraph. Where an online form marks the cover letter field optional, take that at face value, because employers who have made it optional have generally done so deliberately. Where nothing is said, include one.

Zeugnisse are attachments, and this is the part with no equivalent elsewhere. Degree and school certificates travel with the application, and sending your last two school certificates is customary. So do employer references, which brings up the institution that makes this market genuinely different: the Arbeitszeugnis, a written reference your employer owes you when you leave. It has to be truthful and it is expected to be benevolently worded, and those two requirements together have produced a coded vocabulary in which mild-sounding praise reads to a German recruiter as a poor grade. Read yours carefully before attaching it, and ask for a correction if the wording undersells you. It is normal to ask.

What our builder does here is the Lebenslauf component, in English: a single-column, reverse-chronological document generated from facts you approved rather than reconstructed from memory, with the dated entries and the accounted-for gaps that the German convention wants, exported as a text-based PDF whose extracted text we check before you download it. The German wording is yours, and so are the photograph, the Deckblatt and the scanned certificates; the package is yours to assemble in the order above.