Change the layout. Never retype the career

A CV template is usually sold as a look. It is more useful to think of it as a set of slots: an A4 page divided into rows and columns, sections placed into them, and a starting rule for how much of each section fits. Where the line falls between its decisions and yours is worth stating plainly.

The template's side

• Page size, margins, and the gaps between rows and sections.
• Typography — the sizes, weights and spacing used for headings, body text and dates.
• Which sections appear at all, and which column each one sits in.
• Which fields of an entry get printed: a role's title, employer, dates and location, or only some.
• The starting number of entries a section shows, and of bullets it keeps per entry — a default, not a ceiling.

Your side

• Which of your entries appear, and in what order.
• Which bullets survive on each entry — an explicit choice overrides the template's default cap.
• How many entries a section shows, and how many bullets it keeps per entry: each section carries sliders that raise or lower the template's starting numbers for this CV, as far as your own content reaches.
• Which sections you leave empty. A section with nothing visible in it is dropped from the printed page rather than leaving a stranded heading.

That last one matters more than it sounds: a template that can place a dozen sections is not a CV with a dozen sections in it. You are not obliged to fill the slots.

When a template is a document, formatting and content are one object: replacing one replaces the other, and changing your mind about a layout means rebuilding the CV.

Here they are separated on the way across. Your selections — which entries are hidden, the order you put them in, which bullets you kept — are read off the old layout and re-applied to the new one, matched by section rather than by internal id. The design comes wholly from the template you moved to.

When the new template has fewer sections

Move from a full layout to a lean one with no home for, say, awards, and the work you did on that section is not discarded: it is parked, and put back if you later move to a template that carries it again.

A leaner template does start out showing less, though. If the new layout opens with three entry slots for experience and you have seven roles, four stop printing. Nothing is deleted, and nothing is squeezed back in on its own — raise that section's entry slider until the roles you want are back, reorder them, or move to a layout whose default has more room.

No template can be certified compatible with applicant tracking systems, here or anywhere else. Employers run many different systems, configured differently, and how the one reading your application parses or ranks a document is not something an applicant gets to look up; a badge claiming otherwise asserts something its issuer cannot verify.

What can be reasoned about is narrower: how a layout affects the file a machine reads.

Reading order is the real hazard

A PDF stores text in the order it was drawn, not the order a human reads it. uvero.me meets this from the other end — it imports CVs, and reading the drawing stream of a two-column CV interleaves the columns line by line: skills from the sidebar landing in the middle of a job description. Whether a parser untangles that is a property of the parser, and you do not get to know which one the employer runs.

A single-column flow removes the question. Two columns are not fatal — they are common, and they read well to a human — but they are the layout most likely to arrive scrambled.

Text that stays text

The printable page is rendered as ordinary text and printed by your browser, not captured as an image, so the PDF carries selectable text rather than a picture of it — which is what a parser reads most reliably, and what a page scanned or exported as an image does not give it. Beyond that, prefer the plain arrangement: recognisable section headings, dates where dates are expected, information in the order a reader would look for it.

If you tailor a CV to a job advert, the score is calculated from what the CV actually prints — the sections the template places, the fields it prints, the entries left after the section's visible count and your hide-list, the bullets left after trimming.

So two templates, the same career record and the same advert can produce different scores. A bullet cut by a tighter layout stops counting as evidence, because from the reader's point of view it is not there.

If a score moves after a template switch, look first at what stopped printing rather than at the wording. The reverse holds too: a roomier layout invents no evidence, it only lets more of what you already wrote reach the page.