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Practical guide
A long career on one readable page: the last ten years in detail, the rest condensed, the tools you use today, and not a single cliché.
After 50, the trouble with a CV is almost never a lack of material: it is too much of it. A long career written year after year turns into a three-page document nobody reads, where the dates speak louder than the results. This guide shows how to condense without erasing, which dates to keep, what to put forward to show that your experience is current, and how not to undersell yourself when it comes to salary.
Age is one of the prohibited grounds for discrimination: an employer cannot reject an application for that reason, at hiring or later (see the sources at the bottom of the page). The Labour Code allows a few age-related differences in treatment, such as a maximum recruitment age based on the training the job requires, but they must be justified and remain the exception. And since nothing is compulsory on a CV, nothing obliges you to write your date of birth or your age on it. That does not mean hiding your career: you don't make years of experience disappear, you organise them so that what matters is seen first.
The principle: detail for the recent, summary for the old. A recruiter wants to know what you did in the last ten years and what it produced; what you did before interests them as context, not as content.
This split almost always fits twenty-five years on one page, two for a senior management role. The techniques for cutting (old, redundant, obvious) and for saving space without shrinking the font are in the one-page CV.
The unspoken doubt a recruiter has about an experienced profile is: “are they still up to date?”. Answer it before it is asked, with facts:
Two mistakes mirror each other: asking for less “to make up for your age”, or demanding your last salary without looking at the market. Before you write a figure, upload your CV to What am I worth?: the site calculates your market value from INSEE salary data for your profession, your experience and your département, with a range by company size. You then negotiate from that value, with the method in negotiating your starting salary.
On AI-improved CV, choose the “Raise my value” goal: the AI may ask you a few questions (scope, figures, tools), then rewrites the CV with the recent in detail and the old condensed, without creating a single job, date or result; every figure absent from your CV and your answers is replaced with “[X]”. You get a PDF and a Word file, or the same CV in your own layout. Beforehand, the CV analysis tells you where your current CV shows its age: length, headline, job keywords, achievements.
No. Nothing is compulsory on a CV, and age is one of the grounds on which discrimination at hiring is prohibited. Remove your date of birth; your job dates are enough to place your experience, and that is what the recruiter is buying.
You can condense them, not make them vanish: an “Earlier career” line naming the roles and the companies, without dates if they don't help, stays honest and readable. A CV that abruptly starts at thirty-five with nothing before it raises more questions than one summary line.
One page if you can, two if your field demands it (senior management, technical expertise, research). Either way, the essentials must fit on the first: headline, profile, the last two or three jobs with their results. The second page, when there is one, carries the rest of the career, training and skills.
No: you are paid for what you bring. In the INSEE salary data the site uses, a profession's average pay is higher late in a career than at the start in almost every profession. Place yourself on the market first with that data, then negotiate from that value, not from a fear.
This guide gives you a method, not legal advice: the official rules and amounts are those of the sources above, as at their date.
The site's tools and features that go with this guide: the figures there are calculated by the code, never by the AI.