Resume Builder
Plain, readable, machine-friendly
Build a CV with experience, education and skills, previewed live and exported as a PDF that applicant tracking systems can actually read.
Resume Builder
Runs in your browser · nothing uploaded110 words
01 — How to use Resume Builder
02 — Getting good results
03 — Questions
No. The PDF is built in your browser and downloaded directly. A CV contains your full employment history and contact details, and it is worth being deliberate about where that goes.
No. Nothing is stored, so closing the tab loses the draft. Download the PDF before you navigate away — and keep it, since it is the only copy.
No, and that is the point. The visual variety offered by most CV builders is exactly what breaks automated parsing, and a distinctive layout has never been what gets anyone shortlisted. One clean layout that always extracts correctly is more useful than twenty that sometimes do not.
It depends where you are applying. In the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada and Australia the convention is firmly against it, and some employers discard CVs with photographs to limit discrimination exposure. In much of continental Europe it remains normal. This tool does not support one, which is the safe default for the first group.
04 — More about Resume Builder
What an applicant tracking system does to your CV
Most applications of any volume pass through software that extracts the text of the document, attempts to identify sections, and stores the result as structured fields. Everything a human would use to understand the layout — position on the page, font size, whitespace, visual grouping — is discarded or approximated. This is why formatting choices that look sophisticated cause damage. A two-column layout may extract as alternating fragments from each column. Text inside a table may lose its row structure entirely. Dates in a narrow sidebar may end up attached to the wrong role, or to none. Headers and footers are frequently dropped, taking contact details with them. A single column of ordinary paragraphs and bullets has none of these failure modes, because there is only one possible reading order.
Structure carries meaning
A CV is read in a particular order and the convention is worth following, because deviating costs attention you cannot spare. Name and contact first, so the reader knows who and how to reach them. A brief profile, if it says something specific — a generic one is worse than none. Experience in reverse chronological order, because recency is what is being assessed. Education after experience for anyone more than a few years out of university, before it for anyone who is not. Skills last, as a reference list rather than an argument. The reader is looking for a small number of things and knows where each should be; putting them elsewhere does not make them more noticeable, only harder to find.
Why PDF, and why a plain one
PDF is the right format because the recipient sees what you sent: fonts are embedded or standard, layout is fixed, and it prints correctly. A word-processor document renders differently depending on the application and fonts available, and reformatting itself on an employer’s screen is a bad first impression. But PDF alone is not sufficient — a PDF built from an elaborate design carries all the extraction problems described above. The combination that works is PDF for fidelity and a plain single-column layout for parseability. Generating the file in your browser rather than on a server adds a third property: your employment history, contact details and current employer never leave your machine, which for anyone job-hunting while employed is not a small consideration.
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where this came from.
Same shell, same shortcuts, same promise: nothing leaves your browser.