Frequently Asked Questions

Our resume format has been battle-tested by literally millions of job applicants over the better part of a decade since 2018, and we consistently hear about how it dramatically increases candidates' interview rates.

The reason it works so well is that we personally screened tens of thousands of resumes back when we were recruiters / head hunters (mostly for software and tech jobs, but also for finance, marketing, and sales roles). We recruited for the world's largest banks, hedge funds, and VC-backed startups, plus plenty of normal everyday companies as well.

We know what the job of a screener entails, and to boil it down, it's to make it through a pile of 1,000 resumes in 5 hours (200 per hour = 3 per minute = 1 every 20 seconds!). They're not reading your resume; they're looking for signal so they can make a quick up/down call, ideally in 10 seconds or less. It's our job to give them as much positive signal as possible in those 10 seconds, and to do that we guide their eye to your most important and relevant pieces of information. It's also equally important to not give them any negative signal that makes them iffy: we want a "hell yes, let's get them on the phone" in 10 seconds or less.

1) We're here to help - This is a passion project, not a full-on business. We do this for the love of the game (and that "game" is getting you and your family employer-provided healthcare... great system we've got). We've put our heart and soul into training our AI Builder and think it's an incredible "easy button" for people who want a beautiful resume in seconds, or who are stuck in their own heads about what to write in their bullet points. Job searches can drive even the most sane people crazy, and we want to be a trustworthy oasis in an online sea of recruiting predators.

2) Flexible pricing options - Choose a monthly subscription ($39/mo, cancel anytime) or get lifetime access with a one-time payment of $99. Both options include full access to our resume builder, cover letter generator, mock interview tool, and any future tools we release.

3) Google Doc/Word exports - Along with PDF downloads, we also offer a Google Docs export and Word file download, so you can edit your new resume offline and make any special customizations if need be. Other sites usually gatekeep exports or downloads to force you to use their ecosystem only.

4) No-hassle refunds - Not satisfied? Email [email protected] and ask for a refund, and you'll get one the same day, no questions asked. We've personally worked with many thousands of job candidates over the years, and we understand how tight money can be during this time in your life. So we genuinely don't want to take money from people who don't get exactly what they need out of our tools. We've built an amazing product and think you'll love it, but no hard feelings if you don't! We literally only do this to help people, not to pay our mortgages.

5) More interviews, guaranteed – if you start using our format and don't see a marked difference in your interview request rate, email us and we'll give you your money back. (Because that's why you're paying us!)

6) Free resources - We have free tools as well. Our famous MS Word resume template found on our site has been used millions of times, and we've never taken a dime for it.

7) Focused on human screeners, not the ATS - Unlike other builders that try to trick ATS systems into passing you through (only to be immediately rejected by the human screener for obvious keyword harvesting), our resume is designed to actually get you on the phone with a company once a human looks at it – we know you can take it from there.

8) People love us - Read through some of our testimonials. Some people are getting $20k pay raises after switching to our resume! It's pretty incredible that we can help so many people this way, and we hope we can help change your life too.

9) More than just resumes - Every membership also comes with unlimited uses of our AI Cover Letter Generator and Mock Interview tools.

Give it a try! We don't ask for your payment until the very end, so you can see what the final product looks like before buying with confidence.

To fit all budgets and job search timeframes, our AI Resume Builder offers multiple pricing options: lifetime access for a one-time payment of $99, monthly $39 or weekly $19 subscriptions, and one-time temporary passes. Discounts are available during signup for verified students, teachers, military, government, and healthcare workers.

All memberships include unlimited usage of our AI Resume Builder with unlimited resume versions and storage, plus unlimited access to our free AI Cover Letter Generator, our AI Mock Interviews, and our resume-matching AI job search tool (<- insanely helpful). We also release new tools from time to time (like our Resume Anonymizer), and most new features will be added to your plan automatically at no additional cost to you.

We offer a full satisfaction guarantee with no-questions-asked refunds if you don't love it. Prior to requesting payment, we let you use our Builder as long as you like to fully create your whole resume, so you can make an informed decision if it's worth it for you to become a paid member.

Note: we do offer free temporary memberships for those facing financial hardship – just email [email protected] to request a free membership if you have financial constraints and can't afford a paid membership. We do have ongoing costs associated with engineering, maintenance, bug fixes, data storage, customer care, and security, so we unfortunately can't give the AI Builder away for free en masse like we do our free resume template (used by millions). Happily, our paid members allow us the financial flexibility to give away these free memberships to those in need of assistance, so we sincerely appreciate every one of our paid members – you're helping others by helping yourself!

Satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. If for whatever reason you don't think you're getting enough value out of our resume builder, simply email [email protected] with your refund request (and maybe a little feedback for us as to why you didn't love it), and we'll give you your refund that same day, no questions asked.

When do I have to request a refund by?

For Lifetime members, we can only honor refund requests within 30 days of your purchase, which we think is pretty reasonable. (It has unfortunately come to our attention that some people will happily use our resume builder and other tools for months, successfully find a job, and only then ask for a refund. Which is crazy, because we literally give temporary memberships away for free to anyone who simply emails us to ask... alas, the world is a crazy place.)

Along with our lifetime memberships, we also allow users the option to purchase less expensive one-time passes, or ongoing monthly or weekly memberships. We offer these different plans to give users options that work for every budget and every job search length.

For our members who opt for temporary passes with a one-time charge, your access will expire at the end of your membership term, and we generally don't allow refunds beyond the term of your membership. E.g., if you purchase a one-week pass, beyond those 7 days, we don't give refunds for the same reason as above.

For users with ongoing subscription memberships (either weekly or monthly), you can cancel anytime from your Account page, or email [email protected] to cancel your membership. Cancelation requests received prior to your next renewal date will be processed automatically, you'll retain access to all features through the current billing period, and you won't be billed further. For all subscription members, refund requests received within 7 days of your last charge will be honored, though we are only able to refund your most recent charge. If you are unsure if you have a subscription account, you can check your Account page to see if a subscription is active and set to renew.

For Business subscribers with multi-party accounts, we are unable to refund any past charges, but you are able to cancel anytime and cease any further charges right from your Account page.

You can easily cancel your membership anytime and cease any future billing via your Account page.

The goal of a resume is to get a phone call. Period. It's not to tell your life story; it's not to share everything you've ever done; it's not to answer every question the screener could possibly have. The goal of a resume is to get. on. the. phone.

Once you realize this, you'll realize that you don't need a 3- or even 2-page resume. You can look at it more dispassionately and strategically, and not worry about if it's the perfect representation of your self-worth and value.

A resume isn't a representation of oneself, or your life story, or a perfect encapsulation of a career in an 8x11 format.

A resume is a tool to convince someone on the other end of the screen to get you on the phone for an interview.

That's it. Once you realize that your resume is just a tool to land an interview, you start thinking more clearly about it. Don't worry if you can't fit every detail in; that leaves good stuff to talk about in an interview.

Overall, your resume in 10 seconds or less should flood the screener's brain with a ton of positive signal, and give them absolutely no negative signal to worry about. THAT is how you get an interview.

To that end, we don't recommend summaries because the screener isn't looking for a life story, and it pushes your most important or relevant information down the page. You want to anchor the screener's eyes on the single most impressive thing that's relevant to the role you're applying for, and that's almost never a summary (unless you're changing careers or coming back from a long work absence).

Yes, and we actually upkeep and update our resume format frequently based on our experience in our 1:1 reviews.

To understand why our resume format is better than something prettier or more "modern", first you must understand the goal of a resume: to get a phone call. Then, you must understand the creature that is the resume screener: usually young, caffeinated out of their minds, with 1,000 resumes to burn through before end of day. Assuming an 8-hour work day and leaving 3 hours to send emails, be in meetings, and play ping pong, that's about 5 hours they have to screen 1,000 resumes. In other words, 200 per hour, over 3 per minute, or more than 1 every 20 seconds. They're not reading your resume; they're looking for positive signal that they should get you on the phone, and they don't want to see any negative signal that they shouldn't.

So now that you understand this, your goal isn't to show off your design chops in an 8x11 piece of paper. Your goal is to get a "hell yes" in under 20 seconds, preferably under 10. How do you do this? By using our resume format and guide to show them your career path, progression, accomplishments, relevant titles, job loyalty, intelligence, skills, and any other positive signal you can in a 10-second skim. Whatever you do, do not flood their eyes with pretty colors and whimsical twirly designs – after burning through 740 resumes in 4 hours, you too would be going cross-eyed, and a resume popping up on the screen with that much going on might literally kill you.

Why... why would we do that to you? You're coming to us for advice and guidance, ostensibly because you don't know what works and what doesn't when building a resume. You're literally here because you're looking for answers, not choices. We're the experts, not you, and we've seen literally thousands of different formats over the years. Simply put: our format works, we're sure that it works, and millions of people can testify that it works.

Once you understand the goal of a resume is to get an interview – nothing more, nothing less – it follows that there would be one optimal way to format it to achieve that goal, and infinite suboptimal ways. We believe based on the results we've seen over a decade that our format is optimal, and guides the reader's eye to everything they need to see to have a positive reaction in ten seconds or less.

In short, any resume builder website that offers more than one format for you to choose from is simply marketing to you, not actually helping you. In our opinion, they shouldn't in good conscience allow you to browse formats and pick the layout that "speaks" to you. There will necessarily be differences in interview rates amongst formats, so what if you pick a format that gets fewer interviews relative to another? What's the point of allowing you to select that suboptimal format instead of just recommending the best one? How does that help you? It doesn't. Like browsing sneakers with 20 different colors to choose from, offering multiple options simply manipulates you to be more comfortable paying for your "personalized" resume from their website. It increases their conversion rate, at the cost of your interview rate.

Not us. You can relax knowing that we don't have other formatting options because there's literally no point in offering them for you to select from.

We know what works; it's this.

If you have the relevant skills, you will get past an ATS, even one "powered by AI." We try to explain to our clients that the ATS isn't the "great filter" when it comes to your interview prospects: the human screener is. This is because every ATS has the incentive to never block qualified candidates, so it errs on the side of inclusion . A human screener, on the other hand, has the incentive not to get yelled at by their boss for scheduling interviews with unqualified idiots (to use boss speak), so they err on the side of exclusion and are extremely harsh when judging resumes. No relevant title? Gone. Any negative signals? Gone. 4-page resume? Gone. Typo? Gone. Can't skim your resume quickly? Gone. Using quadrants instead of left-right, top-down formatting? Gone. Any colors besides black and white? You guessed it, gone.

Screeners are shallow, superficial people (we are talking about our past selves, so it's cool for us to say this). Imagine a 23-year-old hyped up on too much coffee, who doesn't actually understand the job they're screening for, barely making enough to pay for rent, going cross-eyed from staring at 12-point font and bullet points all day. Unfortunately, these are the arbiters deciding who gets on the phone with the hiring manager. You may think you've written a masterpiece of a resume, but we guarantee that nobody's reading it like you imagine they are.

In short, don't worry about the ATS; your relevant skills and titles will pass you through any AI screen for any job you're remotely qualified for. Worry about impressing the human who has to schedule an interview with you.

There are three reasons why we recommend ending your resume with a single-line "Interests:" bullet point underneath "Skills:"

1. Interests force the screener to see you as a human, and not just one of the thousands of faceless resumes they see every single day.

2. Interests allow the screener to visualize you as a coworker / understand if you're the type of person they'd want to spend time with every day. 40 hours a week for years on end is a LOT of time to spend with another human being – your coworkers influence your mental health more than anyone. Interests show them that you're fun to spend time with, or at least that you're not a psycho loser.

3. Interests are perfect icebreakers for the interview, which will help it go more smoothly (and therefore give you a better chance of getting a second one). If you put Seinfeld as an interest, we guarantee you that every single interviewer over the age of 35 will open by asking you what your favorite episode is. (Mine is The Marine Biologist.)

In short, no, we don't recommend summaries on resumes.

Summaries are a weak way to open. Instead, we recommend to lead with your most impressive thing first – for 99% of people, that's likely their current job. We also recommend putting a bullet point about the company itself, as company numbers and stats (like Fortune 100, market capitalization, venture capital raised, annual revenue, number of users, number of employees, etc.) often dwarf a candidate's individual numbers or stats. We want to anchor the screener on the most impressive things possible in the first 2-3 things their eyes jump to (which are nearly always current employer -> current title -> top bullet point, in that order). You can even tweak your current or past titles depending on the job you're applying for to make yourself more of a "bullseye" for the role (within reason; don't misrepresent yourself – for example, changing your title from "Software Engineer" to "Front End Engineer" to apply for a front-end role is fine).

The reason you almost never want to lead with a summary is that anyone can write a fancy summary that claims they're God's gift to mankind, but not everyone can say they do cybersecurity at a Fortune 500 company. Lean into what separates you: your employer, your role title, your responsibilities, your achievements, your university, your major, your GPA – there are SO many things that separate people from one another, and a summary isn't it.

Still don't believe us? Ok, here are 3 more reasons why you should avoid summaries on resumes:

1. They are often skipped entirely, taking up valuable real estate at the top of the resume that could be used way more intelligently to anchor the screener.

2. They put you on the same "visual footing" as everyone else with a summary, which elevates bad candidates, and harms good candidates. Screeners know this, so they clock summaries as a negative signal that you're likely a weak candidate (because good candidates want to lead with their most impressive experience). You may have an awesome employer and a totally relevant title and a perfectly targeted first bullet point, but now the first 25% of your resume is just… "I'm great!" over and over, like everyone else with a summary. You've visually pushed your most impressive and distinctive things down, in favor of generic language that literally anyone could also write. Maybe they'd be lying, but they could write it.

3. There's no context for them to understand your summary without reading the rest of the resume. You have that context in your brain when you're writing it, which is why it makes sense to you when you're writing it, but to the screener they still need to validate what you've written by screening the rest of your resume. So the summary is de facto pointless since they must screen your resume anyway to validate that what you're saying in a summary is true.

We will admit that there are two reasons why you maybe would want a summary: 1) you're making a career transition and want to explain quickly why you're qualified despite your experience, or 2) you've been out of the workforce for an extended period and need to explain the extenuating circumstance (even then, you should probably just put "self employed" for the time you've been out, or consider starting a personal LLC in your area of expertise to show continued activity in a relevant role). In other words, if you have something to explain, a summary can be important if the resume feels "lacking" without it.

There are almost no other circumstances that justify a summary.

Broadly, no – we don't recommend linking to your LinkedIn on your resume because it opens you up to screeners' visual biases and possible discrimination. Aside from the classic sexism/racism/xenophobic biases (both conscious and unconscious), their brain might involuntarily think you look too young, too old, too much like a frat bro, too pretty, blindingly unattractive, unprofessional, or even too professional... point is, every single HR person is looking for a reason to pass on your application. In effect, sending them to your LinkedIn instead of letting them focus on your resume adds a visual component to a decision that should be based solely on your qualifications. Don't give them another opportunity to say no because of how you look.

As another drawback, it also pulls them into a social networking app, which breaks their focus. They could then become distracted (because that's what social media is designed to do), which could pull them away from the task at hand: deciding on your candidacy and scheduling your interview.

Plus, the information on your LinkedIn should basically match your resume anyway (there's no space constraint on LI so it can be longer--but should never contradict) – it would be weird if it didn't. So it truly adds nothing to your resume. Be sure to update your LinkedIn after this process though to match your new resume. That way when you apply for roles on LinkedIn, your profile is just as impressive as your new "Sheets" resume!

Our resume format works well in the USA, Canada, the EU, the UK (no longer part of the EU, sorry lads), India, Asia, Australia, Central and South America... we could go on. For some nations, we know it is customary to include certain things that we don't have in our preferred format (like headshots in some countries). So while it does indeed work everywhere, it is USA-centric, and you may want to adjust 1-2 things to localize for your country's CV customs.

Why yes, you can! What a perfectly worded question, thank you for asking it that way. Simply "Name Your Resume" for your current resume iteration, and it will save automatically to your file system. Your file system will store every resume version you've ever made and named, and you can access it by clicking "Open."

For example, you can create an initial overarching "Master Resume" version, and then duplicate it as many times as you need to for various job applications with different requirements. With our file system, you can have a main resume version that you can use to apply anywhere, but still tailor it for individual applications.

Once you create a master file, you can then create a brand new resume by clicking "New" to start a new version. You can then start from scratch, or, click "Duplicate Current Resume" to duplicate the current file and make slight variations, and then name and save that version.

To access all your resume versions, go to "My Resume" and click "Open" to search for the specific resume you want to open to either download or edit it.

Remember: when you submit your resume for a job, we recommend naming it simply "FirstName LastName Resume" – nothing fancy, and don't include role titles or dates.

We recommend changing very little: basically, just your current or past job titles, perhaps your first bullet point (your "anchor"), and maybe your listed skills in the Skills section (you may even just want to reorder skills depending on which of your skills each individual job prioritizes the highest). Don't change too much from job to job: you'll drive yourself insane.

"Change my title? Is that even legal?!"

Yep – much like the points in Who's Line Is It Anyway?, titles are made up and don't matter. You should make your titles better match the roles you're applying to (without eerily matching it identically). Of course, make sure not to misrepresent yourself.

For example, if your current role is "Software Engineer," and you're applying for a "Front-End Engineer" role, and you do indeed do front-end engineering, perhaps consider changing your title to "Front-End Software Engineer." There is absolutely no harm in doing this, but it will signal to the screener that you absolutely can do (and are doing) this job.

"Don't companies care?!"

No. They won't find out, and even if they do, honestly, as long as your resume title is close to what your title really is – and accurately represents what you do – they're gonna move forward with an offer. They don't talk to your current company's references until they're ready to make an offer at the finish line, and an extra or missing word in your title isn't going to make them balk at that stage.*

(*Disclaimer: 99% of the time. Take the risks you're personally comfortable with.)

Yes, we offer both student and military discounts when signing up for a lifetime membership. Our student discount is applied automatically for anyone who signs up with a verified .edu email address, and our military / veteran discount is selectable at checkout.

For those who urgently need our tools but who can't afford a membership, please email [email protected] to request a temporary free membership. We're very grateful that our paid members allow us the financial ability to give away our services to those in need during a job hunt.

Our Sheets AI Interview Practice tool can interview you based on any job description and company, and can ask general, cultural, behavioral, and technical questions. You can also practice with different interviewer personas (recruiter, peer, hiring manager, etc.) to ensure you're tailoring answers appropriately at each stage of the interview process.

Beyond that, our AI interview practice tool scores each response out of 10, and provides detailed feedback on what you did well, what's missing, what was poorly stated, and what can be improved.

One of our favorite features is that you're able to answer practice interview questions by either typing out your response to hone in on exactly what you want to say, or by speaking your responses into your device's microphone to practice more off-the-cuff replies.

The Sheets AI Interview Practice tool can then ask intelligent follow-up questions with context and conversational flows derived from previous answers.

Unlimited usage of our AI interview practice is included with any membership during the duration of your membership.

Any organization that creates resumes for people en masse can use our Resume Builder to streamline operations, help many people simultaneously, save huge amounts of time and money, and empower your community to create perfect resumes in seconds – anytime, from any device. Learn more about our Business Memberships.

As a matter of fact we do! If you want to peruse more of our opinionated ramblings we have both a resume & job advice section as well as a regularly-updated blog.

What a nice question to ask. Yes, we actually donate 0.5% of our revenue (not profit, which is always just zeroed-out by creative accountants) to cutting-edge carbon removal projects via our partnership with Stripe Climate. In fact, based on our current usage and membership numbers, every resume is carbon-negative by a large margin!