What a German Lebenslauf is expected to contain

German convention is more specific than most, and it is published. Everything below is taken from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit's own guidance, with the link beside each claim.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— every claim here has a public source. No source, no claim.

Application conventions in Germany are unusually well documented, because the Bundesagentur für Arbeit publishes them. That makes this one of the few countries where the question of what belongs in the document has a public answer rather than a consensus of recruiters. Everything below is taken from that guidance and linked to it.

The personal details

The Bundesagentur's Lebenslauf page lists the personal details the document carries: "Vor- und Nachname, Adresse, Telefonnummer, E-Mail-Adresse, Geburtsdatum und -ort" (arbeitsagentur.de). First and last name, address, telephone number, email address, and date and place of birth.

That last item is the one that surprises applicants from the United Kingdom and the United States, where the published advice goes the other way. It is a genuine difference in convention rather than an error in either place, and the photo and personal details page sets the two side by side.

The same page marks family information and nationality as voluntary, freiwillig, and says religion belongs in the document only where an employer asks for it.

Tabular and reverse-chronological

The structure is described as "tabellarisch und chronologisch": a table rather than prose, starting with the most recent entry and, in the guidance's words, going point by point further back into the past (arbeitsagentur.de).

In practice that means dates in a left column and content in a right one, or a clean single-column equivalent. For each role the guidance asks for the dates, the employer, the position and a few bullet points describing the work; for education, the dates, the type and name of the institution and the qualification.

Two pages

The maximum given is "zwei Seiten" on A4. That is a firmer limit than the usual advice elsewhere, and it interacts with the tabular structure: a table is compact, so two pages holds more than it sounds. Résumé length covers the general question and the ways to recover space.

Place, date and signature

The guidance places location, date and a signature at the end of the document. This is the convention that most often catches people applying into Germany from elsewhere, because it has no equivalent in British or American practice, where a résumé is unsigned.

It is also a reason to keep the date accurate rather than reusing a document for six months: a signed and dated Lebenslauf that is five months old is visibly five months old.

Design, as the guidance describes it

The Bundesagentur asks for a clean, simple layout with a readable typeface, and advises against "verspielte Designs oder Farbwechsel", playful designs or changes of colour. It also says plainly that each application should be tailored rather than the same documents sent repeatedly.

A single-column layout is the natural fit. In the résumé builder here, 21 of the 37 designs are single-column and marked ATS-safe, which means the layout is one column and the text still comes back when it is pulled out of the exported file. That mark is a property of the layout checked on the export rather than a claim about any particular employer's software.

Dates, written so they cannot be misread

A tabular document is mostly dates, which makes date formatting more consequential here than in a prose-heavy layout, and the same is true of the Europass format. Consistency is the whole rule, and the readability check on this site loses points for shortened years and for mixing formats. Date formats goes through what a parser does with each style.

What this page does not claim

It does not tell you what any individual German employer wants, because that varies and no public source can answer it. It reports what the national employment agency publishes, with the link, so you can read the original. Where a convention has no published source, it is not on this page at all.

The Lebenslauf is one document of several. The German application documents page covers the Anschreiben and the Zeugnisse it arrives with.

Language, and which one to write in

Where the posting is in German, the documents are expected in German. Where a company advertises in English, English is usually acceptable, and many international employers in Germany hire entirely in it. The posting is the reliable signal and guessing against it is an unnecessary risk.

What does not change with the language is the structure. A Lebenslauf written in English for a German employer still carries the tabular reverse-chronological form, the two-page limit and the signature at the end, because those are conventions of the document rather than of the language. Translating the content while dropping the shape produces something that reads as a foreign document, which is the outcome the translation was meant to avoid.

Language skills themselves belong in the document. The Bundesagentur lists languages among the relevant skills a Lebenslauf carries, alongside software, licences, voluntary work and interests, and for an application into Germany from elsewhere that entry is one a reader will look for directly.