What changed

For India: the resume format for freshers, resumes for campus placement, CV versus resume versus biodata, Naukri and other job portals, and applying to US jobs from India. For anywhere: writing a summary, how long a resume should be, explaining a gap, and changing careers. And for US federal jobs, what USAJOBS needs now that resumes there are capped at two pages. Reading times are now counted from the words instead of estimated, which shortened every earlier guide's.

Job postings arrive with their own headings — “About you”, “What you'll bring”, “A typical day”, “Nice to have”. The Match tab now recognises many more of them, so requirements written under an unusual heading count as requirements, preferences as preferences, and a company's paragraph about itself, its benefits and its office locations stay out of the comparison.

A resume written in Word and saved as a PDF now imports with its phone number, bullet points, university names and single-date entries intact, and headings such as “Employment”, “Clinical Experience” or “Computer Skills” land in the right section instead of a custom one.

Each template on the templates page now has Word and PDF buttons. The file is made in your browser, by the same code the builder downloads with, from the sample resume its picture shows — nothing is uploaded, and there is no watermark.

Without an account, your resume lives only in this browser, which is what keeps it private and also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. Once there is something to lose, the builder now says so and offers a backup file that opens here again, or an account. Answer either way and it stays quiet for a month.

Every page now loads about a third of the script it used to: the PDF and document-reading code arrives only when you use it. Page titles appear with the page instead of waiting for scripts to run, and the template gallery's pictures are images drawn once from the real renderer rather than drawn in your browser on every visit. On Lighthouse's throttled-phone test, measured against this site, pages that scored 76 to 91 now score 93 to 99.

The site now keeps a tally of page views and of which tools get used — one number per thing per day, with no cookie, no identifier and nothing you type. The privacy page lists every count. Browsers that send Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track are not counted at all.

For India: a software engineer fresher, a B.Com fresher, an MBA fresher and a BPO customer support executive, set on A4. For the US: a cashier, a medical assistant, a warehouse associate and a certified nursing assistant, set on US Letter. Each shows the plain text a parser reads from it.

Matching a resume against a job description now recognises around 150 terms from healthcare, teaching, office work, finance, retail, HR, sales and engineering, so a nurse's or a teacher's resume is compared on its own vocabulary and not only on software terms.

A new tab in the builder shows where the facts a first read looks for — your name, your current and previous roles, your education — land on page one of your actual PDF, and flags a current role pushed low or a fact that has slipped to page two.

A keyword scanner that compares a job posting with your resume, a bullet point checker that asks what each bullet is missing, and a list of action verbs grouped by what you did. All three run in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

Importing a PDF or Word resume whose bullets were marked with ● or a hyphen dropped the first bullet under each job. It no longer does.

Summaries, bullets and descriptions are spell-checked in every browser. Names, email addresses, phone numbers, links and skills are left alone, where a red underline would only be wrong.

The site was redesigned throughout. The pricing page says plainly what will always be free — every download, in every format, with or without an account — and what an account adds.

The builder, the free ATS check, and PDF, Word, plain-text and JSON Resume downloads — free, with no account needed. An account is optional; resumes saved to one are backed up off-site continuously.