Resume guides

Everything here was measured, not assumed. We render resumes to PDF with headless Chromium and read the text back out on every template, in an automated test — these pages are what that produced.

The ATS resume guide: what actually happens to your PDF

How applicant tracking systems parse a resume, which formatting choices survive, and which ones quietly delete your text. Written from a render pipeline we run ourselves.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

Resume format for freshers

One page, education first, projects doing the work experience would do. What a fresher resume needs, section by section, and what to leave out.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

What actually breaks resume parsing: a controlled experiment

We took 33 resume templates, changed one CSS declaration at a time, and extracted the text back out of every render. Which formatting choices destroy text, which silently reorder it, and which turn out to be harmless.

Reviewed 14 Aug 2026

Fresher resume format in India

What Indian recruiters and campus portals expect on a fresher resume: percentages and CGPA, photo or no photo, and the fields that belong nowhere on it.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

What an ATS reads from your PDF

The same resume, shown twice: the page as it prints, and the literal text a parser pulls out of it, in order. Four ways that text comes out wrong while the page looks perfect.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

Are two-column resumes ATS-safe?

Mostly yes, with one real cost nobody mentions. What decides whether a side column extracts in the right order, and what a column does to a two-page resume.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

The campus placement resume

A placement cell's single-PDF deadline is a different problem from applying online. How to write one resume that survives a shortlist of hundreds.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

Fonts that break resume parsing

A font can embed correctly, print perfectly, and still lose every digit in your dates. Three measured failures, including one that cost us a shipped typeface.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

Resume or CV: which one do Indian employers want?

In India the two words are used interchangeably, and the document that gets shortlisted is the same either way. What each term means and when the difference matters.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

PDF or Word: which should you send?

PDF, unless the posting says otherwise — and the reason is not the one usually given. What each format actually guarantees about the text a parser receives.

Reviewed 11 Aug 2026

Turning your LinkedIn profile into a resume

LinkedIn will hand you a PDF of your own profile. What that file actually contains, the three things in it that are the wrong shape for a resume, and what to fix first after importing it.

Reviewed 12 Aug 2026

For the shorter questions — how long a resume should be, how to explain a gap, whether a recruiter can tell you used AI — the blog answers one per post.