CV format: fonts, layout and file type

A CV has two readers with opposite needs: a parser that wants plain text in one reading order, and a person who wants it to look considered. Most formatting advice serves one at the expense of the other. The choices below serve both — and every one of them is a default in the app, so you get them without thinking about it.

One column, one reading order

The single most important formatting decision is a single column. Two-column CVs — a sidebar with skills and contact details, a main column with experience — look organised on screen, but when the text is extracted the two columns interleave line by line, so a skill lands in the middle of a job description and the phone number ends up inside a date range. Some parsers handle this well; many do not, and you cannot know which one you are sending to. A single column reads top to bottom in the same order for a human and a machine. The app's three layouts are all single-column; they differ in type, spacing and how the header is set, not in structure.

Real text, standard headings, embedded font

The text must be real text, not an image of text: exported from a design tool as a flattened PDF or a scanned page, it is invisible to a parser until it is run through OCR, and then it is imprecise. Headings should use the words parsers are trained on: Experience (or Work Experience, Professional Experience), Education, Skills, Summary, Languages, Certifications. "Where I've been" is charming and unreadable to a machine. Bullet points should be plain bullets, not icons or checkmarks. And the font should be embedded in the PDF, so the document renders identically on any computer and the text extracts as the characters you typed rather than as glyph references — a PDF without an embedded font can display as boxes on a machine that lacks it, and can extract as garbage. The app embeds the font, generates real selectable text, and uses standard headings in every layout.

What not to use for content

Tables, text boxes, headers and footers, and images are where CV content goes to disappear. A table used for layout may be read cell by cell in an order that makes no sense. A text box in a word processor is a floating object that some parsers skip entirely — which is why contact details in a text box in the header are the single most common cause of a CV arriving with no phone number. Headers and footers are treated as page furniture and often dropped. Skill-level bars, star ratings and logos are images: they carry nothing to a machine and, for humans, a bar showing "80% Excel" is not information. Put contact details in the body at the top, skills as a plain list, and keep every word you want read in the main flow of the document.

Dates that cannot be misread

Dates matter more than they seem, because a parser turns them into a duration and a recruiter searches by years of experience. Use one format throughout: "Mar 2021 – Jan 2023" or "03/2021 – 01/2023" or years only, but never a mixture. Prefer the month written as a word or abbreviation if the CV crosses borders, because 03/01/2021 is a different day in London and Chicago. Use "Present" for a current role rather than leaving the end blank. Write a real dash or hyphen between the dates rather than "to" or "till". The app formats every date range consistently from the values you enter, in the precision you choose, and the ATS check confirms that each experience entry has a date the checklist can read.

PDF or DOCX, and what to call the file

A text-based PDF with the font embedded is the safest default: modern systems read it reliably, and it looks the same everywhere. Send a DOCX when the employer or agency asks for one — some recruitment agencies do, because they reformat CVs under their own branding before forwarding them. Never send an image-only PDF, a PNG, or a link to a design tool. Name the file so the recruiter can find it on their disk a week later: "Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf" or "Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf", not "CV_final_v3(2).pdf". Choose the paper size for the destination — A4 in most of the world, US Letter in the United States and Canada — which the app lets you switch at export; a Letter document printed on A4 loses its bottom margin and the other way round loses the sides.