Creating Your First Resume
Building, customising, and exporting a resume in the VeriWorkly editor.
Creating Your First Resume
You do not need an account to build a resume. Open the editor and start writing — your work is saved to your browser immediately. Sign in later if you want cloud sync, sharing, AI, or ATS scoring.
1. Start a document
From the dashboard, choose New Document → Resume. You have several starting points:
- Blank — enter everything manually.
- Seeded from your Master Profile — if you already have a Master Profile, a new resume auto-seeds from it. Editing the resume afterwards never changes the Master Profile.
- Import — bring in existing content from JSON, Markdown, GitHub, or LinkedIn. See Importing Your Profile.
Free tier: one active resume
Without a paid entitlement, an account can hold one active resume and one active cover letter at a time. Deleting a document frees the slot.
2. Fill in your content
The left Editor Map sidebar lists every section; click one to edit it in the centre panel.
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Basics | Name, role, headline, email, phone, location. Each contact field has its own toggle for whether it renders as a clickable link. |
| Links | GitHub, LinkedIn, Dribbble, X/Twitter, portfolio, Behance, Medium, YouTube, or custom. A display-mode setting controls whether they render as icons, full URLs, or icon-plus-username. |
| Summary | A short professional summary. |
| Experience | Company, role, location, dates, a summary, and bullet highlights. Mark a role current to leave the end date open. |
| Education | School, degree, field, dates, and an optional summary. |
| Projects | Name, role, link (with an optional custom label, or rendered as plain text), summary, highlights, and associated skills. |
| Skills | Named groups, each holding a keyword list — for example "Languages: TypeScript, Go, Python". |
| Extended sections | Certifications, awards, publications, languages, interests, volunteer work, references, achievements, and freeform custom blocks. |
Phone numbers are validated as US-format
Phone validation currently expects a 10-digit US number. International numbers will be flagged as invalid — a known limitation, not a bug in your input.
3. Control which sections appear, and in what order
Two independent mechanisms, both of which apply to the exported file as well as the preview:
- Reorder by dragging — drag a section card in the left Editor Map sidebar to move it. The order number on each card updates as you drop.
- Reorder and toggle in Design controls — the settings panel's section-visibility list offers a Position dropdown per section as well as drag handles, plus a visibility toggle.
Hiding a section keeps its data intact. That is the intended way to tailor one document for a specific role — trim what is irrelevant without deleting anything.
4. Choose a template
Seven resume templates, all free with no plan-based lock. Every one is single-column and ATS-safe by design — they differ in density, header treatment, and typographic breathing room, not in parseability.
| Template | Best for |
|---|---|
| Executive Clarity | The default. Balanced spacing and clear section segmentation. |
| Precision ATS | Longer resumes. High density, tuned for reliable machine parsing. |
| Modern Minimal | Letting the writing carry the page — no rules, generous whitespace. |
| Timeline Focus | Long tenures. Dates sit in a fixed left gutter so a chronology scans in one pass. |
| Corporate Brief | Corporate applications. Split letterhead with accent-barred section headings. |
| Bold Impact | Career changes and senior pitches. Centred masthead over a heavy accent rule. |
| VeriWorkly Special | High-impact modern layout with distinct rules, badges, and balanced hierarchy. |
Switching templates never changes your data, so you can cycle through all seven freely. See Resume Templates.
5. Customise the appearance
The Design controls panel adjusts the visual parameters shared by the on-screen preview and the export:
- Colours — accent, body text, muted text, page background, section background, borders, and section-heading colour, each set independently.
- Typography — font family (which also determines what gets embedded in the PDF) and line heights for body and heading text.
- Spacing — section spacing and page padding.
6. Export
The export menu offers six formats, all generated in your browser:
| Format | Best for |
|---|---|
| Sending to recruiters and uploading to job boards. | |
| DOCX | When an employer requires Word, or you want to hand-edit further. |
| HTML | Embedding or self-hosting. |
| Markdown | Version control, or pasting into text-based systems. |
| Plain text | ATS forms that ask you to paste your resume as text. |
| JSON | Backup, or re-importing into VeriWorkly later. |
Blank fields are omitted, but blank titles fall back
Empty dates, company names, and locations are dropped from the export rather than printed as
placeholders. The one exception is an entry's title: an experience with no role renders as
"Role", and the same applies to education ("Education"), projects ("Project"), and custom
items ("Item"). Give every entry a title, or hide the section.
Toolbar actions worth knowing
- Import JSON / Import Markdown — bring content in from the toolbar's actions menu.
- Reset to defaults and Empty all fields — these wipe the entire document.
Destructive actions have no undo
Reset to defaults and Empty all fields apply immediately with no confirmation step, and the editor has no undo/redo. Export a JSON backup before using either.
Next steps
- Resume Templates — the template system in detail.
- Exporting and Sharing — share links, passwords, expiry.
- ATS Checker — score the resume you just built.
- Master Profile — stop re-typing your history for every application.