A CV that works for a local employer often fails with a remote one. The person reading it may be in London, Toronto or Berlin, they may be screening two hundred applications for one role, and they are looking for two things before anything else: can this person do the work, and can they work with us across the distance. Everything below is about answering those two questions faster.
Set aside one evening. Open your current CV next to a remote job post you actually want, and work through these six changes in order.
Rewrite every bullet as a result
Swap duties for outcomes: not "responsible for the payments service" but "cut checkout failures 30% by rebuilding retry logic". Numbers travel across borders better than job titles do.
A recruiter abroad may not know your employer, your bank or your telco. They do understand "reduced support tickets by a third", "closed $180k in new annual revenue" or "shipped the Android app to 40,000 users". If you do not have exact figures, use honest ranges and scale: team size, number of customers, volume of transactions, time saved.
A useful pattern for each bullet is verb + what you changed + how much + how. Write three of these for each recent role and delete the duties list underneath.
Cut it to two pages
Remote recruiters skim. Anything past page two rarely gets read, so keep your last ten years and summarise the rest in a single "Earlier experience" line. If you have fewer than eight years of experience, one page is better still.
Cutting is easier when you ask of each line: would the employer in this posting care? Secondary-school results, every short course you have taken and long lists of software you used once can all go.
Remove the personal details
Photos, date of birth, marital status and religion all come off. Most employers hiring internationally would rather not see them. Including them can quietly get your CV set aside.
Keep your name, the city and country you work from, an email address you check daily, a phone number with the country code, and links to LinkedIn and your work. A full street address is not needed.
Put your hours up top
State your timezone and the core hours you can commit to in the first three lines. For example "Lagos (UTC+1) · available 8:00–17:00 UTC". It answers the question every remote recruiter has before they ask it.
If you have already worked with a team in another timezone, say so in the same line: "Two years working with a US East team, 4 hours daily overlap." That one sentence does more than a paragraph about being a team player.
Link what you built
A public GitHub, a portfolio or a short Loom walkthrough does more than a certificate. Remote teams hire on evidence they can click.
Pick your two or three strongest pieces and link them directly, not just your profile homepage. If your best work is private, write a short case study: the problem, what you did, the result, and a screenshot with anything confidential blurred.
Match the language of the posting
Mirror the exact skills and titles the employer uses. Many employers screen with software first, and it looks for their words, not yours.
If the post says "customer success" and your CV says "client relations", change it, as long as it is true. If they list "PostgreSQL" and you wrote "SQL databases", be specific. Keep a master CV with everything, and save a tailored copy for each application.
Two pages, no photo, results in every bullet, your hours at the top. That is most of the work.
Before you send it
Export to PDF, name the file with your name and the role ("Amara-Okafor-Backend-Engineer.pdf"), and read it once on your phone. Many recruiters open CVs on a phone between meetings. If it reads well there, it will read well anywhere.