It gives you the best chance a document can. Applicant tracking systems read the text out of a PDF, so the thing that kills a résumé is a file with no readable text in it — a design exported as an image, or a scan. This tool prints through your browser’s own PDF engine, so every word stays as selectable, searchable text, with no images of text anywhere and a heading structure a parser can follow. What no tool can promise is a specific system’s behaviour: they differ, some are old, and none of them publish their rules. That is exactly why single column is the default here.

Because multi-column layouts are the most common way a well-written résumé gets misread. Text extraction from a PDF often works down the page rather than across it, so two columns sitting side by side can come out interleaved line by line — your skills list spliced into the middle of a job description. The applicant never finds out; the file simply reads as nonsense to the machine. Use the two-column sidebar when you know a person opens the file first: a direct email, a recruiter you already speak to, a small company with no portal. Use single column when you are uploading through an application form.

No. Your draft is written to this browser’s own storage as you type, and read back the next time you open this page, so closing the tab does not cost you an hour of work. It never leaves the device: the site is static files served from a CDN, with no server and no database to receive it. That storage is why this page says your résumé stays in your browser rather than that nothing is saved — a name, a phone number, an address and an employment history are exactly the sort of thing you should expect a plain answer about. Clearing your browser data, or pressing “Start a blank résumé”, removes it. A photo, if you add one, is resized in the page and stored the same way.

Mostly it depends on where you are. In the UK, Ireland, most of Europe, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, “CV” is the ordinary word for the two-page document you send with a job application — which is what this tool makes. In the US and Canada, that document is a “résumé”, and “CV” means something different: a long academic record listing publications, grants, teaching and conference papers, which runs to many pages and is used for research and faculty posts. If a US job ad asks for a CV and it is not an academic post, they almost certainly mean a résumé. This page uses both words because the same document answers to both.

One page if you have under about five years of history, two if you have more. Two pages is normal and unremarkable for an experienced hire; three needs a reason, and academic CVs are the exception rather than the counter-example. If you are pushing over by a few lines, try Compact density before you start cutting content — it shrinks the whole document by about a tenth without touching a word. After that, cut the oldest roles down to a single line each: nobody is hiring you for what you did in 2011.

It depends on the country, and getting it wrong can count against you in either direction. A photo is conventional on a CV across much of continental Europe and much of Asia. In the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada and Australia, employers generally prefer CVs without one — some recruiters discard photo CVs on sight, because a photo hands the employer information they are not allowed to consider and creates evidence in a discrimination claim. When you are unsure, leave it off: no employer has ever rejected an application for having no photo, and the space buys you two more lines of achievements.

Rewrite is too strong; retarget is right. Keep one master version here and change three things per application: the headline under your name, the order of your skills, and the top two or three bullets on your most recent role. Use the words the posting uses — if it says “demand planning” and you wrote “forecasting”, both a keyword search and a hiring manager scanning for a match will miss you. This is also the practical reason for saving your draft in the browser: the expensive part is writing the history once, and after that a tailored version is ten minutes.

Because a PDF library in the page would cost about 40 KB of download for every visitor, and the PDFs those libraries produce draw text as shapes. That is invisible on screen and fatal here: text drawn as shapes cannot be selected, cannot be searched, and cannot be extracted by the software screening your application — so the résumé that looks perfect is the one that arrives empty. Your browser’s own “Save as PDF” produces real text with no download and no upload. Press Print, then pick “Save as PDF” as the destination.