CV Builder

How this is worked out

Start with the vocabulary, because it signals whether you know the market. In the UK the document is a CV. "Résumé" is understood but reads as imported, and "curriculum vitae" spelled out in full reads as slightly stiff. CV is what job adverts say.

Two pages is the norm here, not the exception. A one-page CV is not read as disciplined the way it is in the United States; it is read as thin. Two pages is what a recruiter expects to receive and what a hiring manager expects to skim.

A personal statement at the top is conventional. Three or four lines saying who you are, what you do and what you are looking for. It is the part most likely to be read before the decision to keep reading is taken.

No photograph and no date of birth. Age is one of the nine protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010, and UK employers routinely instruct applicants not to supply information that reveals a protected characteristic — some application systems strip it automatically. Including it does not help and may cause a careful employer to discard the document.

And the machine-readability part. A single column, no tables used for layout, no text inside images, standard headings, and real text rather than a rasterised page. Applicant tracking systems parse text; everything decorative is invisible to them at best.

A worked example

Why a UK CV is longer than an American résumé

The two documents are trying to do different things. An American résumé is a pitch, edited hard to one page because the first pass is measured in seconds. A UK CV is closer to a record — it is expected to account for your career, with dates that join up, and two pages is the space that takes.

The practical consequence for anyone moving between the two markets is that the same file is wrong in both directions. A one-page CV sent to a British employer looks like an applicant with little to say. A two-page résumé sent to an American one looks like an applicant who cannot edit.

This page treats two pages as the target and says so in the readout rather than warning you at page two as though something had gone wrong. Beyond two, trim: a CV that runs to four pages in the UK is unusual outside academia and the public sector.

The personal statement, and how to write one that is not filler

A personal statement is three or four lines at the very top. Done well it tells a reader what you do, at what level, and what you are aiming at. Done badly it is a run of adjectives — "a highly motivated and dynamic team player with excellent communication skills" — which describes nobody and is skipped.

The test is whether a sentence could appear on somebody else's CV without alteration. "Highly motivated" passes that test, so it says nothing. "Front-end engineer with nine years building design systems for regulated products" does not, so it does.

Keep it factual and specific, and put a number in it if you have one. It is also the part of the CV most worth rewriting for each application, because it is the part most likely to be read.

Age, the Equality Act, and what employers actually do

Age is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, alongside disability, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity. Discrimination on those grounds is unlawful in recruitment as well as in employment.

That is why a UK CV carries no date of birth and no photograph. It is not that supplying them is illegal — it is that employers do not want the information, because possessing it makes an age-discrimination claim harder to defend. A significant number of applicant systems now strip names and dates before a shortlisting panel sees anything.

A related habit worth dropping: graduation years. They are a reasonably precise proxy for age, and on a CV covering twenty years of work they add very little. Dates on roles matter and should be there; the year you finished your degree usually does not.

What happens to what you type

Nothing is transmitted. Your CV is held in your browser, the PDF is composed in your browser by a library served from this site, and this page makes no external request at all. No account, no email gate, no watermark.

This is a bigger deal for a CV than for most documents. A CV is a complete employment history attached to a name, a phone number, an email address and a town — enough to identify you precisely and to construct a fairly detailed picture of your life. Free CV builders that require a sign-in are collecting exactly that, and for many of them the collection is the business.

The cost of the promise is that nothing is saved when the tab closes. Use the copy-link button to keep your entries in the URL, or export the PDF and keep the file somewhere you control.

Assumptions and sources

Protected characteristics

GOV.UK, "Discrimination: your rights" — age, gender reassignment, being married or in a civil partnership, being pregnant or on maternity leave, disability, race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. https://www.gov.uk/discrimination-your-rights checked 2026-08

Equality Act 2010

The Act itself, including Part 5 on work and recruitment. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents checked 2026-08

ATS behaviour

Not sourced to a standard, because there is no standard. Applicant tracking systems are commercial products, they differ, most publish no parsing specification, and many are configured per employer. The format rules here are the widely-agreed failure modes, not a claim about any named product.

Two-page convention

A convention rather than a rule, and stated as one. It is consistently reflected in UK recruiter guidance and is the length most UK application forms are designed around.

Not covered

Covering letters, academic CVs, NHS and Civil Service application forms — which mostly replace the CV with a structured form — and anything about what to write rather than how to format it.