Should You List Every Job You've Ever Had?

A CV isn't a legal record of your employment history — it's a pitch for a specific role. Every job you list should be earning its place by making the case for the role you're applying to now.

As a rough guide, the last ten to fifteen years of relevant experience is usually enough. Older roles, especially ones unrelated to your current direction, can be condensed into a single "Earlier career" line with job titles and dates, rather than full bullet-pointed entries.

Short stints — a role you left after a few months — don't need to be hidden, but they also don't need the same detail as a three-year role. One line explaining what it was is usually enough; over-explaining a short stint often draws more attention to it than leaving it plain.

The exception: if an older or shorter role is the single most relevant thing you've done for this specific application, it's fine to give it more space than its recency would otherwise justify. Relevance beats recency when the two conflict.

What you leave off entirely should be roles that add nothing to the story you're telling — not because they're something to hide, but because a CV that includes everything reads as a CV that hasn't been edited.