At this stage of my career, my longform CV is 50+ pages. It’s a document into which I plop everything: every technical program committee and grant-review panel I served on, every student defense I sat in on, every contributed conference talk one of my students gave. Every dollar I received for my work, both intra- and extramurally. The only place I expect to submit this document is to my institution for annual reports and stewardship of my professorship funds. I would also submit the whole thing (perhaps with small changes) if I were applying for a new job or if I were being considered for an award.
Abbreviated forms of the CV are solicited fairly often. For example, federal agencies typically require a 2-page biosketch with education, appointments, a certain number of relevant papers, and highlights of synergistic activities, which generally means noteworthy professional service and/or awards. I recently had to write a 3-page version of the CV for an internal funding solicitation. I also have a one-paragraph biosketch that is useful to share when I write letters of recommendation or evaluation for peers.
However, in recent years it has become more common to receive requests for a full CV from people who already need something else from me, such as international PhD students who need a letter of support and a research plan to apply for a visa, graduates applying for the green card via the NIW mechanism and are asking for a letter, and, with alarmingly increasing frequency, people soliciting evaluation letters for tenure and promotion.
I am not comfortable sharing the full CV with random people, not because there’s anything secret in there, but because not everyone needs to know every single thing about my record. It feels like being asked to show people your underwear; not everyone is entitled to that information. The full CV should be reserved for the cases where I am being evaluated for something. It is intrusive to ask for it to supposedly corroborate my worthiness as an opinion giver. You should be able to make do with a blurb or a 2-page biosketch, especially when coupled with information that’s readily available online (department page and Google Scholar).
Recently I sent in an evaluation letter for promotion with an abbreviated CV, and they came back to specifically request the full one. I felt really irked by this request. I already produced a letter you wanted and you presumably had enough information to decide I would be a good person to ask in the first place. Why do you need a document about me that will be as long as your candidate’s whole dossier?
Blogosphere, how do you feel about sharing your longform CV?
xykademiqz 
I don’t have things like my graduate students or every talk I gave each year on mine (it’s a paragraph without duplication, ditto all of my reviewing which is almost a full page now), but I have my full cv on my webpage and it gets updated every year. Grant info is also abbreviated.
So… I guess I’m not bothered by it? Happy to send the full thing.
I don’t send the internal one because the required formatting is nuts and I hate it. (Faculty affairs is “aware of the problem” but has no plans to do anything about it.)
I typically tell the requester that I don’t have a time to prepare a full CV and they just download what is on LinkedIn and ok with that. Just say No and let them deal with it.
Yeah, I agree with having to take the time to format my full CV is too much of an ask. I take the same approach of putting EVERYTHING and I mean everything. That leads to a lot of information present that probably isn’t relevant to whatever purpose the CV is needing to serve.
Guessing that the tenure letter ask is because tenure is the hazing of academia, “rules” must be followed. And the “rule” at that institution is full CV from all letter writers. Which is dumb, but that’s because all hazing is dumb. Also, I’m guessing it was some department staff who sent the request so also may not have the liberty to interpret what can fly with tenure package guidelines?
Did you end up sending the full CV or did you hold your ground and say no? Or just ignore the request?
I’m at a university where Faculty Affairs requires a full CV from all P&T letter writers (with small exceptions for a subset of already tenured hires who don’t need letters at all). What makes it a full CV is all the education and post-PhD academic work AND all publications (not just selected or recent publications). The rest isn’t really required because it varies by department. From what I can tell it’s mostly read by humanities professors on the university-level P&T committee and nobody else and they tend to judge reviewers by current institution, national awards, quantity of publications, and PhD institution. We’ve never had any reviewer kicked back but we also have a detailed list of requirements that at least n-1 of the n to n+2 letters must have, and it’s more important if the current institution isn’t on a specific list of universities. (Can you tell one of the major services I’ve been doing?)
You should probably create a “full external” CV along the lines nicoleandmaggie suggest: all education, post-PHD employment, and publications with your name on them. No one has an inherent right to know all your students, all your grants, all your committee work, all your courses, … . You may well want to keep a complete record of all that information, for those times when some of the extras are needed (like promotion). But you need to have a quick way (either by cut and paste or by programming) to create reduced CVs that are “complete” in a restricted sense of being complete in the categories they include, but not including all categories of information you preserve.
This is an interesting question. I send a full version after some parts have been redacted (such as institutions for which I’ve done promotion & tenure reviews), but it does seem like a lot and somewhat invasive.
I have kept an up to date and detailed complete academic CV from the time I was a PhD student. It is my record so I know exactly what I did and don’t need to think about it or make something every time I need a CV, I just add a line every now and then when anything has panned out (I also keep a CV of failures on the side with rejected grant proposals).
It has also been fun (in retrospect) to watch it grow over the years from “how am I ever going to fill two pages” to “how did I end up with 50 pages”.
I am totally OK sharing this with people – I think we need to normalize what actual achievements and work look like and for some people that is committees and what not and not just Cell/Science/Nature papers.
I use it internally for promotions etc and it costs me very little effort to prepare. It is one of the best investments I’ve made in my life and it also helps with ACTUALLY memorizing what you did.