Should you include your address on your CV in 2018?

By: Sobhan Mohmand, Editorial manager       Last updated: 28 Oct 2018

It is common practice for candidates to include their address on their CVs. Your home address can be a positive trust indicator that you are local, established and settled in a particular location rather than being always on the go or not having a permanent address.

Over the past few years, however, concerns have been raised about the usefulness or effectiveness of this practice. This guide will briefly explain the pros and cons of including your home address on your CV so that you can decide for yourself what the best thing to do is in your situation.

Why you should include your address on your CV

The top part of your CV is reserved for your personal details including name and contact details. Writing your home address in this section is a widespread and standard practice that has been happening since the invention of CVs and resumes. Why break with convention? Why make your CV stand out for not having an address? Sometimes, it’s best to stick to conventions; particularly when your job or livelihoods are at stake.

If you live locally to the job you are applying for, including your address on your CV may add some additional value to your application as some employers give preference to local applicants over those that commute long distances to work.

Ideally, it shouldn’t matter whether you are commuting for half an hour or one and a half hours; as long as you get to work on time and fulfil your duties, it’s all good. However, we do not live in an ideal world and sometimes personal preferences, biases and judgements affect our decision making.

Having an address on a CV can be an excellent trust factor.

It shows to the prospective employer that you have a permanent place (rather than being on the go all the time), you do not have something to hide by omitting it, and that you follow a standard CV writing convention which is adopted by the vast majority of applicants.

Why you shouldn’t include your address on your CV

As previously stated, some employers may be biased towards local applications compared to those that have to travel long distances to come to work. It may be wise not to include your address on your CV if you live very far from the job and have not specified whether you’d be happy to relocate close to the job.

It is sad but true that the area in which you grew up or live in may sometimes affect the way people deal with you. Some applications have claimed that this is also the case in the job application process, where they have faced discrimination simply based on the location in which they live in. Although it is hard to confirm these accounts, there may be some truth to them.

Ideally, if you have the right experience and qualifications for a senior and well-paid role, it shouldn’t matter whether you live in an affluent suburb of London or in a deprived neighbourhood in Manchester. You should only be judged based on the skills, experience and added value that you bring to the organisation, regardless of your background or in which neighbourhood you live in.

In some isolated cases, there may be instances of personal biases towards applicants who live in poor areas of the country. In order to avoid discrimination, some applications may understandably decide not to mention their address on their CV.

In the later stages of the application process, applications will be required to provide all their personal detail, including their full address, to the HR department. Before that, what is the need to disclose your full address on a CV? One can use that valuable space for more important information, particularly for applicants who are struggling to cut down the length of their CVs to 2 A4 pages.

In recent years there has been a significant rise in identity fraud crimes. This has made many people wary about disclosing any of their personal or sensitive details in public, including mentioning their address on their CVs.

I would say that before thinking about taking your address completely out of your CV, there are a number of ways in which you can write down your address without exactly pinpointing your home location:

Approach 1:

Approach 2:

Both these approaches will keep your personal details safe and at the same time inform the employers of your current living circumstances. Win-win!

However, if you’re still not happy and feel anxious, you may leave your address out of your CV altogether. Many prospective employers are quite forgiving for this, provided that you have included your telephone number and email address.

To include, or not to include: that is the question!

There are both advantages and disadvantages of writing your address on your CV. Whether you should or shouldn’t include your residence address on your CV comes down to personal choice and preference. Based on what you have read, what do you think is the most sensible thing to do?

Format of writing an address on a CV [with examples]

This section is for those who have decided to include their address on their CV…

Depending on the layout/structure of your CV, there are a number of different ways in which you write down your address on your CV. The following are the two most popular approaches that candidates take when writing their addresses:

Example 1 – full address:

Example 2 – compact:

Note: Do not write the prefix Address: in front of your address; prospective employers are intelligent people, and they know when they see an address (well, most of them do, anyway).

Conclusion

Having an address on a CV can be an excellent trust factor. Based on our estimates 93% of candidates will include their address on their CVs. For the remaining 7% of the candidates; there are some alternatives such as condensing the address slightly or omit it altogether if there is a good reason for doing it.