About the Resume Builder
Fill in the form on the left and watch your CV build itself on the right. When it looks right, download it as a PDF. There is no account, no email address to hand over, no watermark, and no "upgrade to remove branding" at the end.
Everything you type stays in your own browser. Your work history is not sent to a server, because there is no server involved.
The PDF holds real text — and that matters
Most free CV makers take a screenshot of a web page and wrap it in a PDF. It looks fine to you. It is a solid wall of pixels to a computer.
That is a problem, because most medium and large employers put your CV through an applicant tracking system first. It reads the file, pulls out your name, your email, your job titles and your skills, and files you against the vacancy. Handed a picture, it finds nothing, and a good application can be filtered out before a person ever sees it.
This tool writes the PDF as text. Open it and try to select your name — you can. Search the file for a skill — it is found. Copy and paste a bullet point — it pastes as words. That is what an employer's software needs.
It starts filled in
Open the page and there is already a finished CV on the right, at half the width of the screen so you can actually read it. That is deliberate: an empty form renders an empty sheet of paper, which tells you nothing about what you are going to get.
The example is there to be typed over. Change the name, change the jobs, delete what you do not need. If you would rather start from nothing, press Start again and every field empties.
An empty form is never saved, so the example is always what you come back to until you have written something of your own.
What you see is what downloads
The page on the right is not an approximation. It is drawn from the same measurements the PDF is drawn from — the same font, the same millimetres, the same line breaks. If a job spills onto page two on screen, it spills onto page two in the file. When you are trimming to fit one page, that is the only kind of preview worth having.
Seven layouts
- Modern *(the default)* — a tinted side column holding your contact details, skills, languages and certificates, with your experience running down the main column.
- Modern right — the same, with the tinted column on the right instead. Worth trying if the left-hand column feels heavy.
- Banner — your name reversed out of a full-width block of your accent colour. The boldest of the seven, and good for design and marketing roles.
- Timeline — one column, with a coloured rail and a dot down the side of every job. It makes a long career read as a progression rather than a list.
- Classic — one column, your name centred at the top. The plainest and the safest.
- Minimal — no rules under the headings, wider margins and more air. Looks its best with the Times font and a short CV.
- Compact — Classic with tighter margins and slightly smaller text. Use it when you have ten years of history and want it on one page.
All seven are equally readable to a tracking system, because all seven are real text — the difference is only what a person sees. If you are applying somewhere very traditional, Classic or Compact is the safe pick; anywhere else, the default Modern is a better first impression.
Then choose a font (Helvetica, Times or Courier — the three that every PDF reader has built in, so your file looks the same everywhere), an accent colour, A4 or US Letter, and one of three text sizes.
Should you put a photo on your CV?
There is no single right answer, which is why the photo here is optional and off until you add one.
Leave it off in the UK, the USA, Ireland, Canada and Australia. Employers there are advised — sometimes required — not to consider a photo, because it invites discrimination claims. Some companies bin a CV with a photo rather than risk it, and some tracking systems strip it out anyway.
Put one on in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where a Bewerbungsfoto is still the norm; in South Korea, Japan and China, where a résumé without one looks unfinished; and in much of France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Latin America and the Middle East.
If you are not sure, look at how the job was advertised and at what the employer's own site does. When it is genuinely a toss-up, leave it off — a missing photo is rarely held against you, and an unwanted one sometimes is.
If you do use one: a plain background, your face filling most of the frame, daylight, and the clothes you would wear to the interview. A cropped holiday snap reads as exactly that.
Round or square is up to you. The photo is cropped square and masked here, so it prints the way it looks on screen, and — like everything else in this tool — it never leaves your browser.
Writing a CV that gets read
The tool handles the layout. These are the things that actually get you an interview:
- One page if you have under ten years of experience. Two at most, ever.
- Start each bullet with a verb — *Built*, *Cut*, *Led*, *Shipped* — not "Responsible for".
- Put a number in wherever you can. "Cut load time from 4s to 1.2s" beats "improved performance" every time.
- Match the words in the advert. If it says "React" and you wrote "front-end frameworks", the software looking for React does not find you.
- Newest job first, and give the older ones fewer lines.
- Whether to add a photo depends entirely on the country — there is a section on it below.
- No date of birth and no marital status in the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada or Australia.
- Use a plain email address. Your name is fine. A nickname from 2009 is not.
Features
- A live page that is exactly what the PDF will be, page breaks and all
- Seven layouts, three fonts, any accent colour, A4 or US Letter
- An optional photo, round or square, placed where each layout expects it
- As many jobs, qualifications and projects as you like, added and removed as you go
- Selectable, searchable text in the PDF — readable by applicant tracking systems
- Automatic page breaks that never cut a heading off from what follows it
- Saved in your browser as you type, so a closed tab does not lose your work
- Save my answers as a small file you can keep, and load back later or on another computer
- Starts filled in with a worked example, so you can see a finished CV straight away and type over it
- No account, no watermark, nothing uploaded
A note on alphabets and symbols
The three fonts here — Helvetica, Times and Courier — are the ones every PDF reader has built in, which is what makes the file open identically everywhere without carrying a font inside it. The trade-off is that they cover Latin alphabets only.
Common symbols are handled for you: an arrow typed as → becomes ->, a tick becomes a bullet, and fancy spaces and dashes are converted to ones the font has. That matters for more than looks — a character the font does not know is also *measured* wrongly, which is how text ends up running past the edge of its column.
Anything genuinely outside those alphabets — Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, emoji — cannot be drawn at all, and is replaced with a question mark. You will see that in the preview, and a note appears under the page, so nothing is a surprise when you open the file.
Related tools
- Word to PDF — if you already have a CV in Word
- PDF to Word — get an old PDF CV back into an editable file
- Compress PDF — for a portal with a file-size limit
- Merge PDF — join your CV and a cover letter into one file
- Signature Maker — a signature for the cover letter
Good to know
- Save my answers gives you a small .json file. It is only your own answers — keep it somewhere safe and load it back next time you apply for something, instead of starting again.
- Start again clears the form and the copy kept in this browser. It cannot be undone, so save your answers first if you might want them.
- If you use a different browser, or clear your browsing data, the saved copy goes with it. The .json file is the one that lasts.
How to use it
- Type over the example — start with your name, the job you want, and how to contact you
- Write two or three sentences in the summary — what you do and what you are after
- Add each job, newest first, with one line per achievement in the bullets box
- Add your education, and any projects worth showing
- List your skills, separated by commas
- Try the layouts — there are seven, and the accent colour changes all of them
- Trim until it says "One page" if you can
- Press Download PDF — and press Save my answers so next time takes two minutes
