Meta - July 2026
Everyone wants to fix my CV
I signed up for a LinkedIn Premium trial, mostly out of curiosity about whether "better" was a feature or a feeling. Around the same time I posted that I'd rebuilt my CV and site, flipped on "Open to work", and sat back to see what the premium tier actually does.
What it did was summon a queue. Within a day, around a dozen people had messaged me offering the same thing, near enough word for word: they would improve my CV and make it ATS-friendly. Kind offers, all of them. The timing was the problem. I'd spent the previous day doing exactly that, by hand.
What "ATS-friendly" actually means
My CV isn't a document I fiddle with; it's built. One TypeScript file holds the facts, and the build turns them into the site, the printable version, the PDF, and a separate single-column CV shaped for the software that reads applications before a human does. Change a fact once and it lands everywhere.
That single-column version is the whole trick, and it's the part nobody's selling you. An applicant tracking system reads a file as one stream of text, top to bottom. A clever two-column layout, the kind that looks sharp to a person, collapses into scrambled order for the machine. So "ATS-friendly" mostly means boring on purpose: one column, plain headings it recognises - Summary, Experience, Skills - a skills list written as text rather than a graphic, and dates where it expects to find them. No secret sauce. Just knowing the reader is a parser, and writing for it.
Then I ran the thing through the free tiers of the same scanners those messages were selling. My score went from about 50 to 81. Along the way the tools cheerfully contradicted each other - one docked me for overusing action verbs, the next for using too few - and the genuinely useful checks were, naturally, behind the paywall. One wanted me to rewrite "Shipped front-end and API work" as "delivered high-performance front-end API solutions that enhanced user engagement". I kept mine - I'd sooner read like a person than a keyword.
A day of honest work and free tools got me to 81. I'm still not sure what the paid version was going to add.
I'm not knocking anyone earning a living, and the demand is clearly real. But it's worth noticing what's on sale. "Optimise your CV for the robots" has become a commodity at the exact moment the person holding the CV can usually do it themselves - read what the machine spits out, fix the layout, and write it in your own words. None of that needs a specialist. It needs an afternoon and the nerve to trust your own voice.
All writing - CV