A CV (curriculum vitae, literally “the course of one’s life”) or resume is a traditional, but still widely used way of applying for a job. Its main use is to highlight your value to a potential employer, and provide sufficient information to get you through to the next stage in the process.
A CV should be succinct, accurate and well laid out. You should see it as an opportunity to market yourself to an employer. The problem for employers is that you, the candidate, decide what to put on the CV and it may not include information that the employer wants. For this reason some employers ask you to fill in their own application form instead.
References involve similar problems for employers, in that the information they get back is what the referee chose to tell them. This makes them less reliable than other methods of assessment, so they are usually only used (if at all) to back up other information and for sensitive positions, such as security or working with children positions.