Arabic CV, English CV, or both — decide by who opens the file
The language of your CV is not a statement about your identity. It is a guess about the person who will read it, and you can usually make that guess accurately.
People agonise over this and then decide it on instinct, usually landing on English because English feels safer. Sometimes that is right. Often it is the reason a perfectly good application goes quiet.
The question is not which language represents you better. It is a narrower, more answerable question: who physically opens this file, and what do they read all day?
Send English when
- The job posting is written in English, including the requirements section. A posting written in English by an Egyptian company is a signal about the internal working language, not a formality.
- You are applying to a multinational, a regional office, a tech company, an agency, a bank's head office, or anything with an international parent.
- The recruiter's own LinkedIn profile is in English.
- You are applying anywhere in the Gulf. Even where the hiring manager is a native Arabic speaker, the HR system, the job requisition and the approval chain are almost always in English.
- Your field's vocabulary simply does not exist comfortably in Arabic: software, digital marketing, data, aviation, hospitality operations.
Send Arabic when
- The posting is in Arabic, or the company communicates with you in Arabic.
- You are applying to a government body, a public-sector company, a syndicate, a court-facing legal role, a school teaching the national curriculum, or a local family business.
- The role is customer-facing in Arabic — retail management, branch banking, medical representation, call centre supervision, community sales. Here an Arabic CV is a live demonstration that you write your working language well.
- Your strongest credentials are Arabic-language ones that lose their weight in translation: a Sharia law qualification, an Al-Azhar degree, a syndicate membership, a public-sector grade.
Send both when the target is bilingual
Plenty of Egyptian employers are genuinely bilingual: a construction firm bidding on international contracts, a hospital group, a large FMCG distributor. Send both — as two separate files, clearly named, English first in the attachment order if the posting was in English.
What you must not do is put both languages inside one document. A CV with an Arabic column and an English column side by side halves the space for content, mangles the reading order for anyone parsing it, and produces the worst typography you will ever attach to your name. Mixed-direction text in the same paragraph breaks in almost every PDF exporter at some point.
The traps in the Arabic version
Do not translate what nobody translates
Write Excel, SAP, Python, AutoCAD, Photoshop, CFA, PMP, IFRS in Latin script inside your Arabic sentences. Nobody in an Egyptian office says "لغة بايثون" in a meeting and nobody searches for it. Job titles are more delicate: "مهندس برمجيات" is standard and understood, while a laboured Arabic rendering of "Growth Product Manager" makes you look further from the job, not closer.
Keep one spelling of your name
Mohamed, Mohammed, Muhammad, Mohamad. Pick the spelling on your passport and use it on the CV, on LinkedIn, on your email address and on your certificates. HR systems match candidates across sources by name, and three spellings can turn one applicant into three half-complete records — or into a mismatch when your degree is verified.
Dates and numbers
Use Western digits (2021 – 2024) even in an Arabic CV. Arabic-Indic numerals read beautifully and confuse both date parsers and Gulf HR staff who may not be Arabic-first readers. Use Gregorian years. If you served in the armed forces, write the dates plainly; leaving an unexplained two-year gap creates a bigger question than the service ever would.
Register
Write formal Modern Standard Arabic without becoming ceremonial. No rhymed openings, no "أتشرف بأن أتقدم لسيادتكم", no honorifics stacked three deep. That register belongs to a petition from 1975, and to a reader under 40 it reads as a candidate who has not worked in a modern office.
Keeping two versions in step
The real cost of a bilingual CV is not the translation. It is drift: you fix a date in the English version in March, update your title in the Arabic one in June, and by September you are attaching two documents that contradict each other. A recruiter who spots that will assume the more flattering one is the lie.
This is precisely the problem a single structured profile solves. Enter each job once, with its dates and its numbers, then write the wording for both languages against the same underlying record and export whichever you need. If your history changes, it changes in one place. Velorah is built this way for exactly this reason, but the principle holds even if you keep a plain spreadsheet as your master copy: facts in one place, phrasing in two.
The awkward question about English fluency
If your written English is shaky, an English CV will expose it in the first three lines, and no template rescues that. You have two honest options and one bad one. The honest options: submit in Arabic where the market allows, or get the English version edited by somebody whose English is genuinely strong and then keep it short — short and correct beats long and approximate. The bad option is a machine-translated English CV, which is recognisable from across the room and which quietly answers a question the interviewer had not yet asked.
Every CV is written for one reader. Picture that person, then pick the language they will find easiest to say yes in.