Resume format in Malaysia: what to include, and what to leave out
Eternity Job Career Team20 October 2026 · 8 min read
Leave your IC number off. Nobody needs it until you're hired, and a resume gets forwarded, printed and left on a meeting-room table far more often than you'd like to think.
Most Malaysian resumes still follow a template that someone's older cousin used in 2005: a passport photo in the top corner, then IC number, date of birth, race, religion, marital status and a line reading "References available upon request". Recruiters in KL will not reject you for it. They will, however, scroll past half a page of information that tells them nothing about whether you can do the job, and the first half page is the only part many of them read closely.
This guide covers the shape a resume should take for a white-collar role in the Klang Valley, the personal details worth keeping, and the ones you should cut.
The shape that works
Keep it to two pages if you have a few years of experience, and one if you're a fresh graduate. Use a single column. Two-column templates look smart in Canva but often scramble when an applicant tracking system reads them, and on a phone they shrink into something nobody can read.
The order that works for almost everyone:
Name and contact details
A short profile, three or four lines at most
Work experience, most recent first
Education
Skills, languages and certifications
Fresh graduates can swap experience and education, since the degree is the strongest thing they have. We cover that version in our guide to a fresh graduate resume.
Under each job, give the employer, your title, the dates and three to five bullets. Write the bullets as results with numbers where you can find them. "Reduced month-end close from eight working days to five" tells a finance manager something. "Responsible for month-end closing" tells them you had a job description.
Save it as a PDF unless the ad asks for Word, and name the file properly. Your_Name_Resume.pdf is easy to find in a hiring manager's downloads folder. CV_final_v3(2).pdf is not.
What to include in the header
Your name, a mobile number, a personal email address and the area you live in. That's the core. A LinkedIn URL is worth adding if your profile is up to date and matches the resume.
For location, the town is enough. "Shah Alam, Selangor" or "Cheras, Kuala Lumpur" tells an employer in Bangsar South roughly how long your commute will be, which they do care about. Your full street address tells them nothing more and puts your home on a document you can't control.
Use an email address that is your name. If your Gmail is still the one you made in Form 3, make a new one.
If you are not Malaysian, state your work pass status in one line, because the employer will need to know before anything else. If you are Malaysian, you don't need a nationality line at all.
Here is a header you can adapt:
[YOUR FULL NAME]
[Current job title]
[Town], [State]
[Mobile number] | [yourname@email.com]
[linkedin.com/in/yourname]That's five lines. Everything below them should be about your work.
What to leave out
IC number
Your MyKad number is the key to a great deal of your financial and official life, and a resume is not a secure document. It gets emailed to agencies, uploaded to shared drives and printed for interview panels. An employer genuinely needs your IC number once they hire you, to register you with KWSP and PERKESO and to handle your tax. That happens on an onboarding form, after you've signed an offer.
If an online application form insists on it, that's the employer's choice and their data to protect. Your own resume should not carry it.
Age and date of birth
Your graduation year and work history already give a fair idea of your age. Stating it outright only gives a reader the chance to decide you're "too junior" or "too senior" before they've seen what you've done. Leave it off.
Race and religion
These have no bearing on whether you can reconcile accounts or run a marketing campaign, and listing them invites exactly the kind of filtering you'd want to avoid. Religious belief is also classed as sensitive personal data under section 4 of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010, alongside physical and mental health, which means an organisation needs your explicit consent to process it in most cases. There is no reason to volunteer it on a document that gets passed around.
Since the 2022 amendments came into force on 1 January 2023, section 69F of the Employment Act 1955 also allows the Director General of Labour to inquire into and decide disputes about discrimination in employment. How far that reaches in practice will be settled case by case. A resume without these fields simply keeps the conversation on your work.
Marital status
Married, single or divorced, it is your business. Listing "Married, 2 children" can work against you in ways no recruiter will ever admit to, particularly for women in their late twenties and thirties. Leave it off and answer the question only if it comes up, and only to the extent you're comfortable.
Expected salary
Putting a figure on your resume fixes your number before you know the scope of the role, the benefits or the band the employer has budgeted. Too high and you're screened out. Too low and you've negotiated against yourself in writing.
When the application form asks for it, answer there with a researched range. When the interviewer asks, use the approach in our guide to answering the expected salary question. Your current salary doesn't belong on the resume either.
References
"References available upon request" is a line every recruiter has read ten thousand times and nobody has ever acted on. They know you'll provide references when asked. Cut the line, and cut any list of referees' names and numbers too. Your former manager would rather not get calls from every agency that has seen your resume.
Do prepare two or three referees separately, though. Ask them first, tell them what roles you're going for, and keep their details ready to send when an employer reaches that stage.
The rest of the old template
A few other things can go without anyone missing them:
Height, weight and health status
Father's name, occupation or anything about your family
Your SPM results, once you have a diploma or degree, unless the ad specifically asks
A "Hobbies" section listing reading, travelling and badminton
The word "Resume" or "Curriculum Vitae" at the top
What to keep that people often drop
Languages matter here more than in most countries. A Klang Valley employer serving clients across the region wants to know if you can handle a call in Bahasa Malaysia, write in English and read Mandarin or Tamil. List each language with an honest level: "Bahasa Malaysia (fluent), English (fluent), Mandarin (conversational)". Overstating it gets found out in the first meeting with a client.
Professional certifications go in too, with the year. ACCA, CIMA, the MIA membership, PMP, a cloud certification: these are the things a recruiter searches for. Put the full name the first time, since an applicant tracking system may search for either the acronym or the long form.
A notice period line is worth adding near the top if you're employed. "Notice period: one month" answers a question every recruiter asks on the first call, and saves you a round of back-and-forth. If you're unsure what yours is, our guide to notice periods in Malaysia explains how the contract and the Employment Act interact.
A driving licence only belongs if the role involves driving or travelling between sites, such as field sales in the Klang Valley or a site role in Cyberjaya.
Every job page on Eternity Job lists the skills the employer is looking for. Read them before you send your resume, and make sure the ones you genuinely have appear in your skills section in the same words.
A before-and-after
Here's the top of the resume an HR executive in Subang Jaya was sending out last year:
CURRICULUM VITAE
[photo]
Name: Your Name
IC No: 930412-10-XXXX
Date of Birth: 12 April 1993 (Age 33)
Race: Indian Religion: Hindu
Marital Status: Married
Address: No. 15, Jalan SS 15/4, 47500 Subang Jaya, Selangor
Expected Salary: RM5,500
And here's the version the executive sends now:
YOUR NAME
HR Executive, Talent Acquisition
Subang Jaya, Selangor
016-789 0123 | yourname@email.com
Notice period: one month
Profile
HR executive with six years in recruitment for a regional logistics
company. Hired 80+ staff a year across Klang Valley warehouses and
the Shah Alam head office. Looking for a talent acquisition role
with a larger graduate intake.By the fourth line of the new version, a hiring manager knows what the executive does and wants to do next. The old one spent eight lines on personal facts that no job description has ever asked for. The numbers in the profile are the executive's own, and yours should be too.
