Guide
Pick the guide by where you are in the application
This category has two guides and one tool, and they work best in order rather than as alternatives. The guide to writing a resume starts from a blank page: what belongs in each section, how to turn a list of duties into results, and how long the finished document should be. The guide to ATS-friendly resumes picks up once you have a draft, and deals with the layout choices that decide whether screening software can read it at all, such as headings, columns, file type and how closely your wording should follow the advert.
The resume builder is for the moment you have your material and want it laid out without fighting a word processor. It will not decide what to say for you; the writing guide does that part. If you already have a resume that has worked before and only need to adapt it to a new advert, skip the first guide, read the second, and then update your entries in the builder.
The salary calculators come in later, after an offer or a pay review, and they answer a different question: not whether you will be hired, but what the job pays once tax, deductions and rising prices have taken their share.
Articles
Where to start in career
Start with How to Write a Resume: Every Section, With an Example, and ATS-Friendly Resume: How These Systems Actually Work, and How to Format for Them — they cover the most common questions in this category and each links to the calculator that matches.
2 articles are published in this category so far. Each one follows the same structure: the formula or method, a worked example, a comparison table where relevant, and a direct link to the live calculator.
Context
Gather these before you open a blank page
The most useful thing to have open is the job advert itself. Save a copy, because adverts are often taken down once the closing date passes and you will want it again before an interview. Mark the duties and requirements it mentions more than once; those are what the person shortlisting will look for first, and they tell you which of your experiences to lead with.
Next, the dates. Write down the start and end month and year of every role, course and significant gap, and check them against old contracts, payslips or a tax record if you are unsure. Dates that do not match what a reference or a background check later reports cause more trouble than the gap itself would have. Keep job titles as they officially were, and add a plain description only if the official title means nothing outside that employer.
Then collect evidence. For each role, find two or three things you did that can be counted: orders handled per shift, a budget you looked after, the size of a team you trained, a backlog you cleared and by when. Numbers you can explain in an interview are worth more than impressive ones you cannot. Finally, ask two or three people now whether they would act as references, and note how they prefer to be contacted, so you are not chasing them once an employer asks.
Scenarios
Five situations that change what the resume has to do
A first resume, written while studying or just after, has little paid work to show, so education moves to the top and everything else earns its place by showing a skill the advert asks for. Part-time jobs, volunteering, society roles, coursework projects and caring responsibilities all count if you say what you did and what came of it. One page is normally enough, and stretching it to fill a second makes the useful parts harder to find.
A career change is the hardest case, because your most recent title points the reader in the wrong direction. Open with a short profile that says what you are moving towards and why your background suits it, then lead each earlier role with the parts that carry over, such as managing money, handling customers or training people, rather than duties that only made sense in the old field. Returning after a gap for caring, illness, study, redundancy or travel is common, and one honest line covering the dates usually works better than stretching other dates to hide it.
Applying in another country changes conventions you may not have thought of as choices. In the United States and the UK, a photo, date of birth and marital status are normally left off, partly because employers prefer not to receive details that could be linked to a discrimination claim. In Germany and some other countries a photo has traditionally been expected, although that is changing. Check the employer’s own careers page or a current guide from that country before you send anything.
When an offer arrives, weigh it on what it pays rather than the headline salary. The salary calculator turns a gross salary and a deduction rate you enter into pay per period, so it works wherever you are taxed; for a job in the United States, the take-home paycheck calculator applies federal, FICA and state tax instead. If one offer is hourly and the other salaried, put them on the same footing with the hourly-to-salary calculator before comparing anything else.
Comparison
Resume or CV, PDF or Word, and which layout
In the United States and Canada, a resume is a short document shaped around one job, usually one or two pages, while a CV (curriculum vitae) is a full academic record of publications, teaching, grants and conferences that keeps growing for a whole career. In the UK, Ireland and many other countries, CV is simply the everyday name for the short document Americans call a resume. So an advert asking for a CV in London wants what a New York advert calls a resume, and an American university asking for a CV wants something much longer.
If the advert names a file format, use it. Otherwise a PDF keeps your fonts, spacing and page breaks exactly as you set them on any device, which is why it is the usual choice. Some recruitment agencies ask for Word so they can remove your contact details before passing you to a client, and some older screening systems read Word files more reliably. Whichever you send, the words must be real text you can select and copy, not a picture of a page.
A reverse-chronological resume lists jobs from the most recent backwards, and most employers expect it because it answers their first questions quickly: what you do now and how long you have done it. A combination, or hybrid, layout adds a short skills section before that history, which helps when your strongest evidence is older or comes from a different field. A purely skills-based layout that drops dates tends to make readers wonder what is missing, so keep the dates even when you lead with skills.
The same habit of comparing like with like applies to pay. A raise and a real raise are not the same thing: the salary inflation calculator sets the percentage you were given against the inflation rate you enter and shows whether your buying power went up or down.
Limits
What these guides and tools cannot tell you
Everything here is general guidance. Hiring practice varies by employer, industry and country, and a hiring manager’s own preferences will outweigh any rule of thumb. When an advert or a careers page gives instructions about length, format or what to include, follow them over anything written here.
The resume builder helps you organise and lay out your content. It does not score your resume, compare it with other applicants, or show how a particular employer’s applicant tracking system will handle it. No outside tool can, because each employer sets up its own system and nobody outside can see those settings, so treat any score a website gives you as that website’s own estimate.
The salary calculators work only from the figures you give them. They cannot see your full tax position, benefits, pension choices or every local tax, and they are not tax advice. Before accepting or turning down an offer on the strength of a take-home figure, check it against the employer’s own breakdown or a first payslip, and ask a tax adviser if the difference would change your decision.