Most CV builders hand you a two-column template with a skills sidebar and an icon set. It looks impressive on screen and falls apart the moment an Applicant Tracking System converts it to plain text. This builder starts from the opposite constraint: every template is single-column and parse-safe, so the CV you download is the CV the software actually reads.
An ATS does not look at your CV. It converts the file to plain text, splits that text into sections, and scores what it extracted against the job's requirements. Anything that survives that conversion poorly costs you evidence you have actually got:
None of the templates here can produce any of that. For the mechanics in full, see how an ATS parses your CV, or whether CV templates help with ATS at all.
Classic, Modern, Compact, Meridian, Sterling, Atlas, Quill, Vector, Cadence, Slate, Beacon, Oxford. All twelve are single-column, and each exports to a Word document that keeps that template's own headings, spacing and section order — so what you download matches what you previewed.
Building, editing, switching templates, restyling and previewing are free and need no account at all — tinker as long as you like. A free account is required to download the Word file and to save your work (one saved CV on a free account, unlimited on Pro). There is no payment anywhere in the builder; the £5 charge on this site is for the separate rewrite of a CV you already have.
Already have a CV that just needs fixing? Run the free ATS report on it instead — no account, no retyping.
Yes. Building, editing, switching templates, restyling and previewing are all free and need no account. A free account is required only to download the finished Word file, and free accounts can save one CV. Nothing in the builder costs money — the £5 charge on this site is for the separate rewrite of an existing CV.
A single-column layout, standard section headings, real dates, and no tables, text boxes, columns or images. ATS software converts your document to plain text before scoring it, and those elements are the ones that garble or get skipped entirely. Every template here is built to that constraint.
A Word .docx file, which opens in Microsoft Word, Google Docs and LibreOffice. .docx is the safer format for UK applications — some public sector portals parse PDFs unreliably, and a few reject them outright.
The layout is deliberately conventional, because conventional is what parses. What distinguishes your CV is the evidence in it — specific, quantified bullet points matched to the advert. The builder gives you a clean structure; the content still has to be yours.
Yes. The ATS check runs against your CV inside the builder and reports a score plus the formatting and keyword issues it finds, so you can fix them before you apply rather than afterwards.
Not necessarily. If you have a CV that just needs fixing, run the free ATS report on it instead — that tells you what is wrong without retyping anything. The builder is for starting fresh, or rebuilding a CV whose formatting is beyond saving.