CV Builder

What ATS software actually does to your CV

Most large companies filter CVs through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before a human sees them. Understanding what the ATS does — and does not do — changes how you should format your CV.

What the ATS extracts

• Plain text from the PDF. It does not "see" the design.
• Section headings that match standard labels (Experience, Education, Skills).
• Dates in consistent formats (Jan 2020 – Mar 2023).
• Job titles and company names in recognisable patterns.
• Keywords matched against the job description.

What breaks the ATS

• Two-column layouts — text from the left and right columns gets interleaved in the wrong order.
• Tables — the parser reads cells as separate lines and loses the structure.
• Icons — a phone icon renders but the phone number inside the icon's SVG is invisible to the parser.
• Photos — treated as graphics and ignored.
• Creative section headings like "My Journey" instead of "Experience".

The impact rule — why 'responsible for' loses interviews

The single biggest difference between a CV that gets interviews and one that gets ignored is not formatting. It is whether each bullet describes a responsibility or an impact.

The impact version always uses numbers: percentages, dollar amounts, time saved, users reached. Numbers are what recruiters remember. When you have no exact numbers, use approximations ("roughly doubled", "cut by half") — the pattern still works.

Length, structure, and the one-page rule

The one-page rule is not absolute. It is a heuristic that reflects the typical recruiter's attention budget: 7-15 seconds per CV on the first pass. Here is the current practical standard:

• 0-5 years of experience: 1 page. No exceptions.
• 5-10 years: 1 page strongly preferred; 2 pages only if the second page is dense with specific projects.
• 10+ years or senior IC: 2 pages.
• Academic CVs: 4-20 pages (publications, grants, teaching).

Never pad. A dense, well-organised one-page CV beats a padded two-page CV every time. If you cannot fit everything on one page, cut the least relevant entries — not the depth of the relevant ones.

ATS-friendly formatting rules

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) read PDFs but often choke on the visual layout choices that look best to humans. Follow these rules to survive both:

• Single column: two-column layouts confuse most ATS parsers.
• Standard headings: use "Experience", "Education", "Skills" — not creative variations.
• No tables: ATS sees them as broken text.
• No icons: the icon renders but the label is invisible to the parser.
• Text-based contact info: don't embed phone or email inside an image.
• Standard font: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia.
• Selectable text: exported PDFs must contain a real text layer.

Impact vs responsibilities

The single biggest improvement most CVs need: replace responsibility statements with measured impact.

Use numbers — percentages, dollar amounts, time saved, users reached. Concrete numbers are what recruiters remember.

Length and structure by experience level

Rule of thumb: never pad. If the content fits in one dense page, use one page.

Tool documentation — CV builder reference

This section documents the technical behaviour of the CV builder: what the exported PDF actually contains, how the ATS-friendliness is achieved, and the cases where you should use a different tool.

What the exported PDF actually contains

Why the PDF is ATS-friendly

Applicant Tracking Systems parse PDFs by extracting their text layer and matching standard section headings. Many CV designs fail this because they use text inside images, non-standard headings like "My Journey" instead of "Experience", or tables that scramble reading order.

This builder avoids all three failure modes:

• Every heading is rendered as real text with a standard name (Experience, Education, Skills, Projects).
• No content is presented as an image — even the design accents are drawn as vector CSS.
• Single-column reading order is preserved for the ATS Cleanline template and all built-in templates.

What we cannot guarantee: no ATS is perfect, and different systems weight different signals. The output structure matches what Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday parsed correctly in our tests, but a specific employer's configuration may still reject a well-formed CV for unrelated reasons.

When NOT to use this tool

• Academic CVs (multi-page publications lists). These follow a different convention with longer formats; a general CV builder is not the right fit.
• Creative portfolios with heavy visual design. A one-page designed PDF or an online portfolio is usually stronger for design roles.
• Legally binding applications. Some jurisdictions require a specific declaration format that this tool cannot produce.
• Languages that are not left-to-right. The current templates assume LTR layout. RTL support is on the roadmap.

How your data is handled

1. Everything you type lives in a React state variable in the current tab.
2. If you save a CV, the data is written to localStorage under a key scoped to this site. It never leaves the browser.
3. Draft recovery reads the same local storage on the next visit and offers to restore your last unsaved work.
4. Export to PDF uses the browser's built-in print-to-PDF. No server is involved at any stage.

Real-world export observations

• A 2-page CV with 4 experience entries, 2 education entries, and 15 skills exports to roughly 90-140 KB depending on whether a photo was uploaded.
• Photo uploads are stored as base64 in local storage, which has a 5-10 MB browser quota. Very high-resolution photos should be resized before upload.
• Printing from Chrome produces the most consistent results across platforms; Safari sometimes adds a small margin that can be removed in the print dialog.