Free Resume / CV Builder

A resume has two readers: the human recruiter, who skims for 7–10 seconds before deciding whether to read further, and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) — Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, LinkedIn — which parses the PDF into structured fields and matches keywords to the job description. This builder optimises for both, following the Harvard Office of Career Services CV guide for structure and the ATS-resume rules published by Indeed, Workable, and Jobscan for parser-friendliness.

Every five templates render to a single-column A4 PDF. Sidebar layouts are visually divided but the underlying text order is linear, so the parser reads name → contact → summary → experience → education → skills regardless of which template you pick. This is the rule Jobscan's parser tests verify against.

Two scores update as you type:

1. Completeness 0–100 — five components, each weighted by their typical recruiter importance: Contact (20), Summary (20), Experience (25), Education (15), Skills (20). It only asks "did you fill the expected sections?".
2. ATS-readable 0–100 — seven components measuring parser-friendliness: contact parseability (20), summary presence (15), experience bullets (25), education listed (15), keyword count in skills (15), standard section headings (5), action-verb openings (5). Computed independently from completeness so the two numbers are an honest cross-check, not two views of the same number — a fully-filled resume can still drop ATS points if every bullet starts with "Was responsible for…".

The page count tile uses two independent estimators — one based on total character count divided by template-specific characters-per-page, and one based on rendered line count divided by page line capacity (using each template's margin and body text size). Both should agree within ±1 page on every realistic input; the tile shows the higher of the two. The PDF renderer paginates exactly, so the on-screen estimate is informational, not load-bearing.

The PDF is built entirely in the browser using pdf-lib — a permissively-licensed PDF generator. The library is dynamically imported only when you press Generate PDF, so the initial page weight stays under the 400 KB site budget. Helvetica is embedded as a standard PDF font, so any modern viewer renders the file identically and most resumes weigh under 50 KB.

Five templates ship today: Modern (software, product, design, marketing); Classic (finance, legal, academic, government); Sidebar (engineers and consultants with a long skills list); Minimalist (senior individual contributors, founders); Creative (design, content, brand, marketing). Switching templates does not lose any content — the form data is the source of truth, and each template is just a different layout pass over the same JSON.

• Harvard Office of Career Services — Resume & CV writing guide
• Indeed Career Guide — How to make an ATS-friendly resume
• Workable — Applicant Tracking System resume best practices
• Jobscan — ATS resume formatting research
• pdf-lib — PDF generation library (MIT licence)

The ATS rubric and template defaults were last cross-checked against the four guides above on 2026-05-11. The page is reviewed when a major ATS publishes a parser change (LinkedIn, Workday, Greenhouse), or when pdf-lib publishes a major-version release.