In 1482, a thirty-year-old Italian polymath wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan.
He opened by listing nine things he could build. Portable bridges that could be assembled and disassembled quickly. Siege engines. Armoured chariots. Naval vessels that could fire below the waterline. In tenth place, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned he could also paint and sculpt.
The letter worked. Leonardo da Vinci got the job, stayed for nearly two decades, and produced, among other things, The Last Supper.
Over five hundred years later, we are still writing documents that list our capabilities and hope they land with the right reader. The medium has changed. The assumptions behind it have not.
This is the history of the document that has sat at the centre of how work gets arranged for more than half a millennium, and how it is being remade again, right now, by artificial intelligence.
The Latin behind the word
The term curriculum vitae is pure Latin. Curriculum comes from currere, meaning "to run" or "a course", as in a racecourse or the course of a river. Vitae is the genitive of vita, meaning "life". Put together: the course of one's life.
The abbreviation "CV" is younger than it looks. The first recorded use in its modern sense dates to 1902. The word "résumé", the American equivalent, comes from the French for "summary", and was first recorded meaning a biographical summary in a 1926 advertisement in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The two terms diverged geographically. In British English, CV is the default for any professional application. In American English, "résumé" describes the short document used for most jobs, while "CV" is reserved for academic and research roles where an exhaustive list of publications, grants and teaching is expected. American PhD applications ask for a CV. American MBA applications ask for a résumé.
The vocabulary matters less than knowing which document the reader is expecting.
Before Leonardo
Written self-promotion existed long before anyone called it a CV.
Medieval artisans carried sketchbooks and sample pieces to patrons and guilds, which is what a design portfolio still is. One of the earliest surviving examples is the portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt, a 13th-century French draughtsman whose sketchbook contains architectural drawings, mechanical designs and animal studies compiled to demonstrate competence to potential patrons. Members of guilds asked previous masters for attestations of their work, which is what a letter of recommendation still is. Municipal authorities kept registers of apprentices, journeymen and masters, which is what a verified credential database still is.
What you carried to show your competence varied by trade. What you were doing was invariant: persuading someone who did not know you that they should trust you with something.
Leonardo's letter, and why it still teaches
The reason Leonardo's 1482 letter keeps being cited in every article about CV writing is not nostalgia. It is that the letter does three things modern CVs routinely fail to do.
It leads with what the reader needs, not with what the writer is best known for. Ludovico Sforza was fighting a war. Leonardo opened with military engineering. The painting went in at the end, even though painting is what he is remembered for today. Writing to the audience comes first. Writing to your own biography comes last.
It is specific. Each of the ten points is concrete: what he could build, under what conditions, for what purpose. Nothing is aspirational. Nothing is vague.
It is short. The whole letter fits on a page. Five centuries later, we still circulate fifteen-page CVs that say less than Leonardo's one.
The four-century silence
The gap between Leonardo's letter and the modern CV is roughly four hundred years. During that time, no standardised genre of self-presentation for employment emerged.
Most people did not need one. Hiring among skilled trades, merchants and professionals ran on word of mouth, guild membership, letters of introduction from respected intermediaries, and apprenticeship records. The formal labour market we take for granted now, where strangers apply to work for organisations that will evaluate them as candidates, simply did not exist at scale.
The term curriculum vitae itself started appearing in Latin academic writing from the 1500s onwards, used at Scottish universities by at least the 1630s. But it described extended biographical accounts, essays and life histories rather than the job-application document the phrase now describes.
The modern CV is a 20th-century invention. It emerged because the alternative, which was knowing someone, stopped working at the scale of industrial economies.
1914: the document gets a name
Résumés began appearing as separate documents from letters of application around 1900. Early business correspondence guides instructed job seekers to "include just the facts and leave personality to the cover letter", an instruction that still echoes in CV advice today.
A 1914 American magazine article describing how to hire good employees had to explain at length what a desirable applicant had submitted. "With the letter was enclosed an abstract giving a complete history of education and business experience, including all positions held, salaries received, and names of firms worked for." The writer had no handy word for "abstract", because the concept was still so new. The résumé as a named document was first discussed in college business communication courses that same year. The word "résumé" itself was first recorded in print meaning a biographical summary in a 1926 advertisement in Lincoln, Nebraska.
1930s: handwritten during the interview
By the 1930s, CVs had become a regular feature of job applications, but they were far from polished documents. Many were scrawled notes written during or just before an interview, functioning more as reference aids for the employer than as advance marketing tools for the candidate.
The striking image of this era is a well-known British photograph of an unemployed man wearing his CV on a sandwich board in the street, advertising his skills to passing employers. It is a reminder that the CV as polished document is more recent than many people realise, and that the job market was, for most, a public and often humiliating thing.
1940s: height, weight, photograph, and women advised not to apply
The first half of the twentieth century produced some of the oddest CV conventions in history.
Career advice books from the 1940s routinely told men to include height, weight, age, marital status, number of children, church attendance, and a photograph in formal work clothing. Some asked about draft status. In some countries, applicants listed blood type.
Some 1940s career advice to women was starker: do not submit a résumé at all.
Read from 2026, these norms look extraordinary. Read from 1945, they looked like sensible hiring practice. The difference is that the era openly encoded class, gender, race and religion as legitimate selection criteria. The CV reflected what the reader was allowed to ask.
Every item above has since been struck from standard UK and US CVs by anti-discrimination legislation. Some remain expected in European, Asian, and Middle Eastern markets.
1950s to 1980s: standardisation
Three decades of gradual professionalisation reshaped the CV into something closer to what we recognise today.
The 1950s made CVs obligatory. Employers routinely required them for white-collar jobs. Career counsellors began publishing books on structure, promoting sections such as Education, Experience and Skills. By 1955, half of business textbooks discussing résumés described the functional or skills-based format as a legitimate alternative to the chronological one.
The 1960s added personal interests, hobbies and club memberships. Rising prosperity and a cultural emphasis on individual expression pushed employers to want a fuller picture of the applicant, and candidates supplied one.
The 1970s brought digital typesetting and early word processors, which professionalised the look of the document even before most candidates had access to computers at home.
By 1987, the fax machine had made speed a competitive advantage. Being able to fax a CV to twenty employers in an hour was a genuine edge. It lasted about a decade before email made it irrelevant.
The legal purge
The most significant and least celebrated transformation of the 20th-century CV was the slow stripping away of personal demographic information.
Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex and national origin. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 extended protections to workers over 40. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 consolidated protections across age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex and sexual orientation.
The practical consequence for CVs was systematic depersonalisation. Photographs disappeared from standard UK and US CVs, though they remain expected in many European, Asian and Middle Eastern markets. Date of birth went from standard, to optional, to discouraged. Marital status, religion and background were similarly excised.
The purge was incomplete. Age discrimination, in particular, persists through implicit signals: graduation dates, the age of technologies listed as skills, the length of a work history. One study of 610 HR professionals found that concealing an explicit date of birth still produced discrimination based on subtle cues such as older-sounding names. Roughly 44% of over-45s report having altered their age information on their CV to improve their chances.
The internet and the rise of the ATS
In the 1990s, email replaced postal mail as the dominant way to send CVs. The first online job board, Online Career Center, launched in the US in 1992. JobServe launched in the UK in May 1994. Job seekers who had depended on newspaper classifieds could now access and respond to roles across the country in minutes.
The same shift that made online applications possible created a new gatekeeper: the applicant tracking system. As companies received hundreds or thousands of applications online, software emerged to parse, filter and rank CVs before any human saw them. A document perfectly suited to human reading might fail ATS parsing if it used unconventional formatting, non-standard fonts, graphics or headers. An entire industry of "ATS-optimisation" advice emerged to compensate.
Some of what is circulated as CV advice online is actually algorithm advice. The two are not the same thing, and confusing them produces CVs that are optimised for software and unreadable by humans.
LinkedIn and the always-on CV
On 5 May 2003, LinkedIn launched. Reid Hoffman and four co-founders built what was initially a sparse database of professional profiles. Profile pictures were added in late 2007. Status updates followed in 2010. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.
LinkedIn did not replace the CV. It dissolved the boundary between a CV and a social profile.
A LinkedIn profile is a CV that updates itself, carries endorsements, shows who vouches for you, and can be read by anyone whether you are applying or not. Recruiters now routinely read LinkedIn first and the CV second. If the two disagree, most recruiters trust LinkedIn.
Your CV is now reviewed alongside your public professional record. The CV used to be the story you told. Now it is the story you tell that has to match the story already visible online. Candidates who rewrite their CV but forget their LinkedIn produce two documents that contradict each other, and recruiters notice.
Three formats, still in use
Three structural formats crystallised over the twentieth century and all three remain in use today.
Chronological. Work history in reverse date order. Default in the UK and most of the English-speaking world. Preferred by employers and ATS systems because it provides a clear, scannable career narrative. Best for steady progression in traditional sectors.
Functional or skills-based. Skills sections front and centre, with a brief work history. Useful when changing careers, bridging significant gaps, or summarising a portfolio of short roles. Recruiters are often sceptical: the format can read as though it is obscuring something, and ATS systems handle it less well.
Hybrid or combination. A professional summary, followed by key skills, followed by reverse-chronological work history. Increasingly popular because it marries the skills-forward appeal of the functional format with the legibility of the chronological one.
The hybrid now wins most contests. It satisfies both the human scanner and the machine parser.
The AI era
The past five years have brought the most disruptive set of changes to the CV since the word processor.
From 2022 onwards, AI writing tools became broadly accessible. By 2026, around 46% of UK jobseekers are reported to be using AI to apply at scale. The consequence is a flood of polished, keyword-optimised applications and a corresponding erosion of recruiter trust in the authenticity of CVs. Up to 80% of hiring managers now report rejecting CVs that sound AI-generated or lack a genuine human voice. Research suggests that up to 40% of applicants exaggerate or falsify details on their CVs, a problem AI content can make worse.
The employer response has been a structural pivot towards skills-based hiring. A 2023 survey found that over 73% of companies said they were choosing a skills-based approach over traditional screening. LinkedIn's 2024 Workforce Report found that 75% of HR professionals consider skills-based hiring the future of recruitment. In practice, this means more pre-employment assessments, practical tasks, scenario-based interviews and portfolio reviews sitting alongside or in place of the CV.
Nearly 67% of global employers now use some form of AI in their hiring process, and adoption approaches 80% in large enterprises. Agentic systems can scan LinkedIn activity, GitHub repositories, published work and verified credentials in real time, constructing a picture of a candidate from primary evidence rather than self-reported claims.
Two forces pulling in opposite directions. Candidates lean harder on AI. Employers lean harder on signals AI cannot fake. The CV is the contested ground between them.
This is not the death of the CV. It is a mutation. The static, self-reported document is being supplanted by a dynamic digital footprint: live LinkedIn profile, portfolio, skills endorsements, verified credentials, published commentary.
The shift puts a new premium on authentic voice. An AI can produce a polished CV. It cannot, yet, reliably produce one that reads like it was written by the person whose name is on it. Experienced recruiters can usually tell the difference, which is why the rejection rate for AI-sounding CVs is rising rather than falling.
The quirky bits
No CV history is complete without the stunt examples.
People have put CVs on chocolate bars, beer bottles, infographic posters, and Google AdWords campaigns targeted at specific hiring managers by name. Some have gone viral. Very few have led to a hire for the role they were aimed at, though several have led to other opportunities.
Video CVs had a moment in the early 2000s, and again briefly in the pandemic years. Most are skits, songs or mock news broadcasts. Most die in the inbox. Short-form video has normalised a version of the format in creative industries, but for most sectors the video CV remains an idea that sounds better than it reads.
"Hobbies" as a section peaked in the 1970s and has been in slow decline ever since. The only hobbies that still reliably appear on senior CVs are ones that signal discipline (endurance sport), judgement (serious amateur music), or niche specialism (rarely-taught languages). Most of the rest came off the page decades ago.
What 500 years tell us
One thing links Leonardo's 1482 letter to the CV you will send this year.
Both are attempts to tell a reader who does not know you that they should take a meeting. The medium has changed. The task has not.
What has changed is the noise. Leonardo was competing with a handful of other letters on the Duke's desk. You are competing with two hundred applications for the same role, filtered first by software, then read by an AI, then scanned by a recruiter in under a minute, then discussed in a hiring meeting where you will not be in the room.
The things that worked in 1482 still work now. Write to the reader. Lead with what they need. Be specific. Be short. Leave the painting until the end.
Most CVs I read for live hiring mandates do none of these things. That is not a format problem. It is a positioning problem. A template is a shape. A recruiter's read is something different entirely. And in an era where an AI can produce a grammatically perfect CV in thirty seconds, the things that still separate one candidate from another are the human things: judgement, taste, self-knowledge, and the ability to see your own career the way the reader will.
Leonardo had those things. That was the point of the letter.
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Michael Muir
Founder · The Other Side
Twenty years placing candidates across high-calibre boutiques through to FTSE 100 companies. Thousands of CVs a year. Writes “Notes from the Desk” on how hiring decisions actually get made.
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