Writing an English resume when English isn't your first language

The step that stops people applying abroad is rarely the experience — it is the moment they have to render it in English. A friend applying to roles in Singapore translated his own resume and got back "please refine your English CV." The background was fine. Every sentence was built on the grammar of another language.

Here is what genuinely differs, how to phrase it, and the mistakes that show up in almost every first attempt.

1. An English resume is a rewrite, not a translation

Run your existing resume through a translator and the output will be grammatically correct and completely wrong in register. English resume conventions are different at the sentence level:

• Roles start with a past-tense verb, not a description of responsibility: "Led the payments project," not "Was responsible for the payments project."
• Team involvement gets specific: "Collaborated with a 6-person team," not "Participated in team work."
• Skills are named, not rated: write Java, Python, SQL, not "proficient in and skilled at."

Sentence shape, tense and word choice all change. Translating preserves the wrong one of those three.

2. Verb first, outcome quantified

The rule is the same one that makes any resume line credible: open with a strong verb, close with a number. Led / Built / Drove / Optimized / Launched — see the full action verb list for what to use where.

Role, scale, outcome, number — all visible in one pass.

3. The phrases that mark a translated resume

Three that appear constantly:

1. Endurance and diligence framing. "Hardworking and able to endure hardship" does not land as a virtue; it reads as strange. If the underlying claim is real, it belongs in an achievement, not an adjective.
2. Proficiency ladders. "Skilled at / proficient in / familiar with" strung across a skills section adds words without adding information. List the technologies.
3. Personality lines. "Cheerful and outgoing" is normal on resumes in some markets and simply absent in English-language ones, which weight demonstrated skills and outcomes.

4. Two ways to get the English version written

1. Translate, then fix the verbs. Machine-translate your existing resume, then rewrite every bullet opening into a past-tense action verb and delete every personal-quality sentence. This is the cheap route and it works if your English is good enough to audit the output.
2. Generate against an English posting. ResuHive will produce the English version directly: paste your experience and the English job ad, and it writes to the conventions above while reporting which of the posting's terms you hit.

On my friend's, the posting used "cross-functional" and "mobile checkout," which became "Led a cross-functional team of 8 to ship mobile checkout" — phrasing he could not have produced by translating what he had written.

Then audit it. A generated line may not match what you actually did; check every number and project before sending.

5. Three things to get right

1. Keep tense consistent. Past roles in past tense, the current role in present. Mixed tense inside one resume is the most visible non-native tell there is.
2. Do not inflate. Reference and background checks are thorough in most English-speaking markets, and an invented figure is worse than a modest true one.
3. Match the posting, not a generic English template. Vocabulary follows the ad; one version does not travel across countries or roles.

6. A verb list to work from

• Leading: Led / Managed / Directed
• Building: Built / Developed / Designed
• Improving: Optimized / Improved / Streamlined
• Driving: Drove / Launched / Spearheaded

Put your real work into one of those openings and add the number. That is an English resume bullet.