Free career tools for resumes, letters and letterheads

Which tool do you need?

Three documents, three quite different situations. Working out which side of the desk you are on usually answers it straight away.

The claim worth being suspicious of

You will find plenty of sites promising a guaranteed one hundred percent ATS score. It is not something anyone can guarantee, and understanding why saves you money and disappointment.

Workday, Greenhouse, Taleo, iCIMS, Lever and SuccessFactors all parse resumes differently. Where scoring exists at all, it is configured per vacancy by the employer, weighted against criteria you cannot see and did not write. There is no shared scale and no universal number to hit. A tool that has never seen a particular employer’s configuration cannot report a score from it.

What can honestly be done is give you a layout those systems read reliably, and check your document against the things that commonly break parsing or lose you a keyword search. That is what our resume builder does, and it describes itself that way rather than dressing up a checklist as a verdict from software it has no access to.

Why these documents look so plain

People sometimes expect a career tool to produce something decorative. Everything here is deliberately unremarkable, and that is the point.

Design and parsing want opposite things. Two column layouts get read across the columns, so your skills sidebar arrives interleaved with your job history. Text inside boxes and headers is frequently skipped entirely. Tables scramble. Icons used instead of the words phone and email leave a parser holding a number with no label attached to it. A photograph is ignored at best, and in several countries it is a reason for the employer to discard the file.

The documents these tools produce use one column, real text, ordinary headings and a standard font. They will not win a design award. They arrive whole, which is the only thing that matters at the stage where software reads them first.

Writing bullet points that carry weight

This is where most resumes quietly fail, and it has nothing to do with formatting. Compare these two lines describing identical work.

Responsible for managing the weekly reporting process.

Rebuilt the weekly reporting pack, cutting preparation from six hours to forty minutes.

The first is a job description that anybody in that seat could have written. The second is evidence that you specifically did something, and it hands an interviewer an obvious question to ask.

The pattern is simple. Start with a verb. Say what you did. Finish with what came of it. Then find a number, because you almost certainly have more available than you think: headcount, budget, percentage change, time saved, volume handled, error rate, how many sites, how many customers.

Keep each line short enough to read in one glance. Past about forty words a bullet stops being scanned and starts being skipped.

Experience letters: who writes them

An experience letter is a statement by a company about somebody who worked there. Its entire value comes from that, which is why it has to be issued by the employer.

If you are the person who left, the legitimate thing to do is draft what you are asking for and hand it to your old manager or HR contact to check, amend and issue on their own paper. That is welcome and it makes the request far easier to say yes to, because somebody can read it, correct anything wrong and send it in ten minutes rather than starting from a blank page.

Writing one yourself and presenting it as though the company issued it is forgery. Background checks catch it more often than people assume, and one phone call to the number on the letter is usually all it takes.

If you are the one issuing it

A few things separate a letter that settles the question from one that raises it. A real date. The employee’s full legal name. The role held and both dates of employment. A named signatory with a job title. And above all a way to verify it, meaning a company email address or telephone number. Letters with no contact route on them are the ones most likely to be doubted, and the doubt lands on your former employee rather than on you.

On tone, write only what you could support out loud. A warm letter for somebody who earned it costs nothing. A warm letter for somebody who was dismissed puts the company in an awkward position if the next employer ever rings. Where a departure was difficult, a plain statement of the facts is both kinder and safer than something you would not repeat.

Letterheads are mostly a legal question

A letterhead answers three things before anybody reads a word: who sent this, are they real, and how do I reply. That is the whole job, and the best ones are quiet.

The part people skip is the footer, and in many countries it is the part that is actually required. Registered companies are frequently obliged to show a company registration number, the registered office address and a tax or VAT number on business correspondence. Regulated professions often have their own rules about naming the body they are registered with.

The requirements vary enough that guessing is a poor strategy. Check what applies where your business is registered, put it in the footer once, and then never think about it again.

On the design side, one accent colour is plenty, the logo should be small, and the header should finish well inside the top quarter of the page. A letterhead taking up a third of the sheet forces every letter onto two pages.

Sending the finished documents

• Send a PDF unless the application asks for something else. It looks the same everywhere and cannot be altered as easily after it leaves you.
• Check the text is selectable. Open your PDF and try highlighting a line with the mouse. If nothing highlights, it is an image and no system can read it.
• Name the file properly. Something like amara-whitfield-resume.pdf tells a recruiter what they are opening. resume-final-v3-updated.pdf tells them something else.
• Combine attachments where a portal accepts only one file. Our merge tool puts a resume, a cover letter and certificates into a single document.
• Watch the size limit. Job portals are frequently the tightest of all, sometimes five megabytes or less. The PDF compressor handles that.
• Keep a copy of what you sent, so you know exactly what they are looking at when they call.

Tailoring without lying

Sending the same resume to forty vacancies is the least effective thing you can do with your time, but rewriting it from scratch each time is not the answer either.

Change two sections. The summary at the top, and the skills list. Those are the parts a screener reads first and the parts keyword searches lean on hardest. Ten minutes on those beats an hour spent rearranging your history.

Paste the job advert into the resume builder and it will show you which of its terms appear in what you have written. The value is in spotting mismatched vocabulary: the advert says stakeholder management and your resume says working with people. Same work, different words, and a keyword search finds only one of them.

Where the meaning genuinely matches, use their phrasing. Where it does not, leave it alone. Claiming a system you have never opened surfaces in the first interview and wastes everybody’s time, yours included. Treat every missing term as a question rather than an instruction: have I done this and simply called it something else?

How long should a resume be?

One page under about ten years of experience, two beyond that. Recruiters spend seconds on a first pass and a third page rarely gets read.

If you are over, cut the oldest roles down to a single line each rather than shrinking the font. Nobody needs four bullet points about a job you left in 2011, and the space is better spent on what you did last year.

Why this stays on your device

Look at what these documents contain. Your full name, phone number, email address, home city, employment history, education and sometimes salary figures. On the employer side, the same details about a named individual, plus the fact that a specific person left a specific company on a specific date.

That is personal data, and in most places an employer has a legal duty to look after it. Typing all of it into a website that uploads it to a server, ties it to an account and keeps it under a retention policy nobody at your company has reviewed is a data protection decision, whether or not anyone treats it as one. Most resume builders ask you to make that decision before you have even seen whether the tool is any good.

Everything here is held in your own browser. Your draft saves to this device so a refresh costs you nothing, and the PDF, Word and text versions are all written on your own machine. There is no account to create, no email to hand over, no watermark on the output and nothing to unsubscribe from later. Clearing the tool genuinely clears it, because there was never a copy anywhere else.

Beyond the documents

Applications rarely stay in one format. The PDF tools merge, split and compress what you are sending. The image tools resize a headshot or lift a logo off its background for a letterhead. And if you only have a job advert as a screenshot, the image to text tool pulls the words out so you can paste them in.