Easiest Résumé Builder
Zety doesn’t have any nonsense, which could work for or against it depending on what you’re after. You don’t get the Kanban board of FlowCV or the automatic optimization of Resume.io. What you do get is a straightforward builder that allows you to quickly throw together a CV and easily change it for different applications.
Like most other builders, you can start from scratch or upload your résumé. Regardless of the route you go, Zety starts with a résumé review before walking you through each section of your résumé. As you move along, Zety provides small tips to optimize your CV. For instance, I had an “experience” section listing my previous employers, and Zety recommended changing the section to “work history.” A résumé review isn’t unique to Zety, but I appreciate that it happens automatically, so you can apply the suggestions while putting your résumé together.
As you move through each step, Zety uses AI recommendations for skills, work history bullet points, and more. The suggestions are surprisingly good, likely because they’re based on a job title you can enter. That allows you to mock up a template and then easily swap out skills or bullet points when applying for specific roles. Make sure to read the AI suggestions first, though. Some of them play fast and loose with their claims. One suggested I highlight my “award-winning reporting,” even though there was nothing on my résumé about awards.
Once you’ve entered all your information, you can swap out templates and colors with a click. Zety doesn’t have a ton of templates, but they’re all useful. You get fewer of the loud designs you see with a tool like Canva. All of the templates in Zety are professional, and when there is a flare, it’s always done with a light touch. Because the templates are so straightforward, it’s easy to swap between them; I cycled through a dozen without changing a single word, and they all looked great.
You can download a text version of your résumé for free, but you’ll need to pay to download a PDF or Word version. I recommend going for the annual plan if you can. There’s a 14-day trial of Zety’s monthly Pro Package for $2, but it renews at $26 per month after that period. The annual plan is 79 percent cheaper.
Best for Improving Your Résumé
All résumé builders will improve your résumé, especially if you don’t have one or haven’t updated it in years. However, Rezi offers specific and detailed advice that’s helpful if you want to give your résumé a total rewrite but don’t know where to begin. Rezi is extremely critical and provides line-by-line suggestions based on best practices. It will say if your job descriptions have too many buzzwords or lean on vague language, and it will prompt you to add metrics to back up your claims, among other things.
Because of how it’s structured, I found that Rezi encouraged me to go through my résumé in detail. I also like how Rezi breaks down a résumé into many sections, each with its own suggestions for improvement. It provides a checklist that can make the process of improving a résumé less overwhelming.
You’ll find that Rezi has fewer templates than many résumé builders, which could be good or bad depending on your goals. All Rezi templates are ATS-optimized, prioritize easy reading, and don’t include anything that might break formatting. This is usually a good idea, but if you prefer a visually stunning résumé (perhaps because your real intent is to post it on your website or to submit it in person), consider other options.
There’s no shortage of AI in Rezi. In addition to using AI for some advice, you can use AI to rewrite portions of your résumé or change the résumé’s content to target a specific job title and description. That can help you make sure your résumé has the precise language that fits the job. This is not unique to Rezi (it’s also a feature of our top pick, Résumé.io), but I think it dovetails with the precise criticisms that Rezi offers about each part of your résumé.
The biggest downside to Rezi is the price. The free version limits the advice you are given, and since that’s what I like about Rezi, it defeats the point. To unlock all features, you’ll need to pay $29 each month or $149 a year. That’s a lot, and the yearly plan is hard to justify, because the value of Rezi’s résumé improvement is front-loaded (once you get it sharpened up, you won’t need to do it again for at least several months). However, a month of Rezi is certainly worth the price.
Other Résumé Builders We’ve Tested
Adobe Express: Adobe Express is powerful, with a ton of customization options and easily the boldest, most unique résumé designs I’ve seen. Shame it doesn’t work. The résumé builder crashed for me five times when trying to design my CV in Chrome—on one of the most high-end PCs money can buy, mind you—and I eventually gave up and moved to Firefox. I was able to get my résumé built on Mozilla’s browser, but I still had to slog through the most clunky interface of any of the résumé builders I tested. Adobe Express isn’t just for building résumés. It’s a complete online design tool, not dissimilar from Canva, but that level of power in your browser (combined with an onslaught of pop-ups asking you to pay) slows everything down considerably. Adobe Express is a good alternative to Canva, and in many ways, it’s even better. But that doesn’t matter much if the web app struggles to stay afloat.
Canva: Online design suite Canva has a résumé builder, and while you can throw together a CV, it’s just not built for job searching in quite the same way as the rest of our picks. Canva is ultimately a design tool, and its résumé builder fits into that mold. You’ll have to individually drag all the elements of your CV around to line them up properly, and play a game of whack-a-mole between free and paid assets available through the web interface. There are some striking résumé designs, but I don’t know how well they’d translate when actually applying for jobs. If you already have a Canva subscription, you can accomplish a lot if you’re diligent with formatting everything correctly. For everyone else, a proper résumé builder is not only simpler, but it’ll also spit out a better result once you’re done.
Indeed Resume Builder: Indeed has a résumé builder that came highly recommended as I started researching, but I’m not sure why. It’s serviceable and easy to use, with step-by-step instructions for filling out your work history, education, and skills. But it’s less of a résumé builder and more of a tool to build your Indeed profile. That’s a perfectly fine purpose, but you can’t take your résumé outside the Indeed ecosystem. You don’t design a résumé on Indeed. Instead, if you haven’t already uploaded a résumé and added it to your account, you can add all of the information you’d normally have on a résumé to your profile. Then, you can use that to easily apply to jobs on Indeed. It works, and Indeed is certainly a massive platform for finding a job. For most folks, however, I’d recommend building a résumé with another tool and uploading it to Indeed instead.
Teal: This résumé builder is paired with job-search and tracking tools, which include a job board and an AI job-search function. It also provides features that might be handy when it comes time to consider offers, such as an offer analysis tool and compensation tracker. A Chrome extension is available, too, to make it easier to tag jobs. However, I felt that the core résumé building tools were unremarkable and that Teal is generally focused on managing your job search overall. While you can get started for free, you’ll really want a subscription, which is priced at $179 yearly or $29 per month. Teal offers a weekly price at $13, which might be handy if you just want to pop in, build your résumé, check the job board, and then move on.
Kickresume: In addition to résumés, Kickresume provides tools for cover letters (which many competitors offer) plus resignation letters and websites (which are less common). That can make it a good one-stop shop. Kickresume also has a Career Map tool, which helps you visualize the types of jobs you might be suited for based on your résumé and preferences. This could become a top pick in time, but at this moment, I feel that, much like Teal, the core résumé builder has no particular edge on the competition. Most features require a subscription, which is priced at $24 a month or $96 a year.
LinkedIn: Unsurprisingly, the career-focused social network has the option to export your LinkedIn profile as a PDF, which can be used as a résumé. However, it’s an extremely barebones tool that converts your existing profile to a basic PDF with no options to alter the content before export. So, while this is technically a way to build a résumé, I would never recommend it.
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