Resume Builder

One column, real text, standard headings — the format an applicant tracking system can actually read.

Your résumé
Exactly as you want it read. No photograph, no date of birth and no marital status anywhere on this form — that is deliberate.
One line. A parser often reads this as your most recent job title.
A city is enough. A full street address is no longer expected and gives away more than it needs to.
Three or four lines. Optional, but it is what a recruiter reads before deciding whether to read the rest.
Most recent first. Reverse chronological is the expected order in all five markets.
One achievement per line. Leading dashes are stripped. A number in the line is worth more than an adjective.
Commas or one per line. Plain text on purpose — a skills bar chart contains no text and parses as nothing at all.

How this is worked out

An applicant tracking system reads a résumé the way a scraper reads a web page: it looks for text, and it looks for landmarks. That single fact settles almost every formatting argument.

One column. A two-column layout with a sidebar looks organised to a person and arrives at a parser as interleaved nonsense — your skills list threaded through the middle of your job history. This tool cannot produce one, which is the point.

No tables for layout. Dates aligned to the right with a table are a common trick and a common failure. Here the alignment is done with position, not structure.

No text in images. A name set inside a designed header graphic contains no characters. Everything here is drawn as text you can select and copy out of the finished PDF — check it yourself after exporting.

Standard headings. "Experience", "Education", "Skills". Parsers key on those words. "Where I've been" and "My toolkit" are the sort of thing that reads well and indexes as nothing.

And what nobody can promise. No format guarantees passing any particular ATS. There are dozens in common use, most are undocumented, and many are configured per employer. What a good format does is remove the known failure modes so the decision comes down to what you wrote.

A worked example

Sample entered
three roles, two qualifications, twelve skills
Bullets per role
4, 3, 2
Sections produced
Professional Summary, Experience, Education, Skills
Estimated length
1 page
Convention here
1–2 pages
Format checks clear
10 of 10
Columns
1
Tables used for layout
none
Text drawn as an image
none
Fields for photo, age or marital status
none — there is no way to add one

One page, two pages, and where the rule came from

The one-page rule is real and it is American. It comes from a hiring culture where a recruiter spends seconds on a first pass, and where a second page is read as an inability to edit. It is not, and never was, a universal standard — the same document that reads as disciplined in Chicago reads as underpowered in Manchester.

The honest version of the rule is: one page if one page holds it, two once there is genuinely enough to fill them. A graduate with two internships filling two pages is padding. A director with fifteen years compressed onto one page has deleted the evidence.

This page estimates the length as you type and says whether it is inside the local convention. The exported PDF then reports the exact count, because the estimate is a character-width approximation and the real number needs the font metrics.

What is not on this form, and why

There is no field for a photograph, a date of birth, a marital status, a nationality, a gender or a religion, and there is no way to add one. That is not an oversight and it is not squeamishness — it is the American convention, and the convention has a specific cause.

Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act make those characteristics protected. The EEOC's guidance on pre-employment inquiries is that the information sought should be limited to what is needed to decide whether someone is qualified. Many employers train recruiters to set aside any résumé carrying a photograph or an age, not because the applicant did anything wrong, but because having seen it is difficult to unsee in a later dispute.

So including them does not help you and can quietly remove you from consideration. The one place this bites people is applicants moving from countries where a photo CV is standard — much of continental Europe, parts of Asia and Latin America. It is standard there. It is not here.

Bullets that survive a six-second scan

The strongest line in a résumé has a number in it. "Rebuilt the checkout front end used by 1.4 million customers a month, cutting median time-to-interactive from 4.1 seconds to 1.6" tells a reader the scale, the work and the result. "Responsible for front-end development" tells them your job title, which they already knew from the line above.

Keyword matching is real but it is not magic. A system looking for "TypeScript" finds it if the word is there, in text, spelled the way the posting spelled it. It does not find it inside an image, and it does not infer it from "modern JavaScript tooling". Where a posting names a technology you genuinely use, use its name.

Keyword stuffing — a block of white-on-white terms, or a paragraph of nouns at the bottom — is a well-known trick and a well-known way to be rejected by a human the moment the file is opened. The text is visible in the PDF whatever colour it is.

What happens to what you type

Nothing you enter is transmitted. It 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. There is no account, no email gate and no watermark on the output.

That matters more here than on most tools. A résumé is a complete employment history attached to a name, a phone number and an email address — a small dossier. Free résumé builders that require a sign-in are collecting exactly that, and their business model is usually the collection rather than the builder.

The trade-off is honest: because nothing is stored on a server, nothing is saved when you close the tab. Use the copy-link button to keep your entries in the URL, or export the PDF and keep the file.

Assumptions and sources

Pre-employment inquiries
US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Prohibited Employment Policies/Practices": information sought through the pre-employment process should be limited to what is essential to determining whether a person is qualified. https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices checked 2026-08
Age discrimination
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects applicants and employees aged 40 and over. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/age-discrimination-employment-act-1967 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 — multiple columns, layout tables, text in images, non-standard headings — not a claim about any named product.
Page count
The on-screen figure is an estimate from an average character width. The exported PDF reports the exact count, measured from the embedded font metrics.
Not covered
Cover letters, federal résumés (which have their own much longer format), academic CVs, portfolios, and anything about what to write rather than how to format it.
Rates current as of August 2026 — verify before relying on this. This is a document builder and a format checker, not career advice and not legal advice. It cannot tell you whether a particular employer's system will parse a particular file, because those systems differ and most are undocumented.
Questions

What people ask about résumés

Should my résumé be one page or two?

One if one holds it, two once there is enough to fill them honestly. The one-page rule is an American convention born of fast first-pass screening, not a law of nature — and it travels badly. In the UK two pages is the norm, and in Australia three or four is unremarkable.

Should I put a photo on my résumé?

Not in the United States. Many employers are trained to set aside a résumé carrying a photograph, because it reveals characteristics protected under Title VII, the ADEA and the ADA, and having seen it is hard to unsee in a later dispute. This tool has no field for one. If you are applying from a country where a photo CV is standard, this is the habit to drop first.

Will this get me past the ATS?

Nobody can promise that, and anyone who does is selling something. Applicant tracking systems differ, most are not documented, and many are configured per employer — so no format guarantees passing any particular one. What this does is remove the format failures that are known to break parsing: multiple columns, tables used for layout, text inside images, non-standard section headings and rasterised pages. The rest is the writing.

Do I need to list my dates of employment?

Yes. A role with no dates cannot be placed on a timeline and some systems drop it from the parsed record entirely. If you are worried about an employment gap, the gap is better explained in one line than hidden by removing every date.

Are skill rating bars a good idea?

They are one of the worst things you can put on a résumé. A five-dot rating contains no text, so a parser reads nothing at all — and a human has no idea what four dots out of five means. Plain comma-separated skills are read by both.

Where does my employment history go?

Nowhere. Everything is held in your browser, the PDF is written in your browser, and this site makes no external request of any kind — you can confirm that in your browser's network tab. There is no account, no email gate and no watermark on the file. Your employment history is exactly the sort of thing that should not be uploaded to a free web service.

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