What to leave off your CV in South Africa

Every line on your CV goes wherever the file goes. A CV can be forwarded between consultants, attached to emails and loaded onto a client's system, and each copy carries everything you put on the page. So ask of each line whether it helps someone decide to phone you, and cut the ones that do not.

Your street address

Your town and province are enough. The street address adds nothing a consultant needs, and it travels with every copy of the file. The rest of the contact block is in how to write a CV for a South African job.

Marital status, religion, dependants and health

Leave these off. Your marital status, the ages of your children and your church usually have no bearing on whether you can do the job.

Two different laws deal with these details. POPIA's special personal information includes religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political persuasion, and health or sex life (section 26). Marital status and family responsibility are not on that list. The Employment Equity Act protects them in a different way: it prohibits unfair discrimination on grounds that include marital status, family responsibility, religion and pregnancy (section 6(1)), and it extends that protection to job applicants (section 9).

An employer may not unfairly discriminate against you on any of these grounds. Leaving them off the page keeps them out of a decision they should have no part in.

References

Write "references available on request" and keep the names and numbers back until you are asked.

Your CV travels, and a former manager's cellphone number on it goes wherever the file goes. You have done that to them without asking, and a number on a widely circulated CV can be misused, for example by someone running a fake background check.

Ask each referee before you give their details out. Tell them which role it is and what you have said you did. A referee caught off guard sounds like a bad referee, even when they are not.

Your current salary

It does not belong on the page. It can anchor the conversation before anyone has decided what the job is worth, and it answers a question nobody has asked yet. There is more on handling that question in what to say when they ask your salary expectations.

Old Matric results

List your Matric subjects and symbols only if you left school in the last two or three years. After that they take up space your work history needs.

Check who is asking before you send documents

Once an application is under way, an agency or employer may ask you for documents. Before you send an identity document, make sure the recruiter or employer is real. Find out why they need it, and ask yourself whether the request makes sense at this stage of the process.

• Do not pay anyone for a job. Do not pay a recruitment agency to find you work explains what the law says.
• Do not send money, documents or bank details to someone you cannot confirm is a real agency or employer.
• Check the company, its email domain, its phone number and its registered office. Find the agency yourself and phone it on a number you found, not the one that contacted you.
• A real agency or employer can usually offer you its own application form, an address on its own email domain, or a meeting in person, and can tell you why it needs each document.

If you have already sent documents to someone you could not verify, the Southern African Fraud Prevention Service runs a Protective Registration that flags your ID number to its member institutions. Its contact centre is on 011 867 2234 (safps.org.za, checked 23 August 2026).

Certified copies, and how recent they must be

Two things are worth knowing before you spend a Saturday morning at a police station.

First, how recent a certified copy has to be varies by organisation, so ask the one that wants it before you get copies made. We have not found a statute that puts an expiry date on a certified copy.

Even within the public service it varies. In Public Service Vacancy Circular 26 of 2026, issued 24 July 2026, one department's notes say only shortlisted candidates must submit certified copies "not older than 6 months of qualifications and other related documents on or before the day of the interview". Another department in the same circular asks shortlisted candidates for certified copies before the interview without naming an age limit. Neither asks for certified copies when you apply.

Second, do not leave an original with an agency. The Employment Services Act 4 of 2014 says at section 14(d) that a private employment agency may not "retain the original identity documents or original qualification certificates of work seekers" (the Act's term for job seekers). Showing an original is one thing. An agency keeping your original Matric certificate is what the Act rules out, whatever reason it gives.

Getting your CV out of an agency's database

When you apply to an agency, it keeps its own copy of your CV. If you no longer want it there, POPIA gives you some specific rights. Which of them apply, and what the agency then has to do, depends on the circumstances and on the basis it relies on to hold your details. None of them gives you an automatic right to have your CV deleted straight away.

You can ask any organisation to confirm, free of charge, whether it holds personal information about you, and to give you the record or a description of it, including who has had access to it (section 23). The confirmation is free. The record itself may carry a prescribed fee, and they must give you a written estimate before they charge it.

Under section 24 you can ask them to correct or delete information that is "inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or obtained unlawfully", or to destroy a record they are no longer authorised to keep under section 14. Deletion is not automatic because you asked. It rests on one of those grounds, and an organisation that still has a lawful purpose for a record can keep it. A CV held for a vacancy that closed a year ago, with no other purpose stated, may well be "out of date" or "excessive".

If the agency relied on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time (section 11). If it relied on its own interests, you can object.

Write to the agency's information officer. Say what you want and under which section, and give them a date. If you are ignored, the Information Regulator takes complaints on Form 5 through its complaints page.

What a job portal can delete, and what it cannot

No job portal can reach into an agency's copy of your CV. The agency holds it under its own privacy terms.

On this site you can download a copy of the information we hold about you, and delete your account from your profile. As the account closes, we email you the list of agencies that have your details, because those copies are theirs to delete and not ours. Our privacy notice says the same in fewer words.

Applying through one account also keeps a record of which agencies you applied to and when. That is much harder to keep track of when you email your CV to forty addresses.