How to make a CV with AutoCoderCV

Building a CV here takes about ten minutes. This walks through each step and, more usefully, explains the decisions that actually change whether your CV gets read.

Step 1: Choose a template

Open the template gallery and pick a layout. The important distinction is not colour — it is structure.

Single-column templates are marked ATS-safe. They have one linear reading order, conventional section headings, no layout tables, and contact details in the body text rather than a page footer. If your application goes through a large employer's careers portal, choose one of these.

Two-column templates are marked Designed. They look better to a human and read well on screen, but the two columns interleave when a parser flattens the page to plain text. Use them when you are emailing a person directly or applying to a smaller company.

You can change template later without losing anything you have written. Only the colours and fonts reset.

Step 2: Fill in your details

The header carries your name, a headline and your contact details.

Your headline is the single most-read line after your name. Make it concrete: "Registered Nurse — Critical Care" or "Full-Stack Developer, Django and React" tells a reader more in four words than a paragraph of summary.

Include a phone number, an email address you check, and your city. Add LinkedIn or a portfolio URL if they are current — a dead link is worse than no link.

Step 3: Write the summary

Three or four sentences. What you do, what you have built or managed, and what you are looking for.

Skip the adjectives. "Detail-oriented, passionate professional" describes nobody. "Registered nurse with six years in intensive care, currently precepting new staff on a 24-bed unit" describes exactly one person.

Step 4: Add your history

Under Content, each section expands into an editor. Add roles, education and certifications; drag them into the order you want; hide anything irrelevant.

For each role, write two to four achievements rather than a duty list. The difference:

• *Duty:* "Responsible for the monthly close."
• *Achievement:* "Shortened the month-end close from nine days to four by standardising reconciliations."

Start each line with a verb. Include a number when you genuinely have one — never invent one, because you will be asked about it.

Step 5: Import your projects from GitHub (developers)

If you write code, connect GitHub from the dashboard and run a sync. Then, in the builder, open Projects from GitHub and tick the repositories worth showing.

Choose six at most. A CV listing forty repositories, most of them practice files, says less than one listing four projects you can talk about for ten minutes. Practice repos, tutorial follow-alongs and abandoned experiments should stay off the page.

We then draft bullets from each README, the language breakdown and your share of the commits. The AI is constrained from producing numbers that are not in your data, so a repository with no README yields a short, honest bullet marked for review rather than an impressive invented one. Edit whatever you like — edited text is never overwritten by a later regeneration.

Not a developer? Skip this entirely and add projects by hand.

Step 6: Adjust the design

Under Design you can change the accent colour, the body and heading fonts, the section spacing, the text size and the line height.

Two sliders matter more than they look. If your CV is spilling onto a third page, reducing text size and spacing by a few percent usually recovers a page without the result looking cramped. Set page size to A4 for most of the world, Letter for the US and Canada — printing an A4 layout on Letter cuts off the bottom.

Step 7: Decide about a photo

The photo toggle is off by default, and whether to turn it on depends entirely on where you are applying.

In Germany, France and much of continental Europe a headshot is conventional and its absence is noticed. In the US, UK, Canada and Australia recruiters are frequently instructed to discard CVs with photos, because a photo invites the bias hiring processes are meant to exclude. Some parsers also handle embedded images badly.

If you upload one, we resize it and strip the embedded metadata. Phone photos routinely carry the GPS coordinates of where they were taken, and that is not something to attach to a job application.

Step 8: Download

Press Download PDF. What you see in the preview is what you get — the same renderer produces both, so they cannot drift apart.

Open the file before you send it. Then, if you want to be thorough, copy the text out of the PDF and paste it into a plain text editor. What you see is roughly what an applicant tracking system sees. If your name is missing or the sections have scrambled, switch to a single-column template.

A last piece of advice

Tailor the CV to the role. Keep a master version with everything, then duplicate it and cut. The version you send should read as though it was written for that one job, because the reader can tell when it was not.