FAQ

Increasingly, your CV is scored by AI before a human ever sees it — and unlike a human, it doesn't infer unstated details from your job title. If it's not written down, it doesn't count.

Usually not. An ATS parses your CV into structured fields for a recruiter to search later — it doesn't make a reject/accept decision itself. A lot of 'rejections' are actually parsing failures: multi-column layouts, text-in-images, or non-standard section headers scrambling the data before a human ever searches for it.

No. JSON Resume, Europass, HR Open Standards, and the W3C verifiable-credentials stack are all real open standards — but no major ATS vendor natively reads any of them. A well-formatted PDF or DOCX, tuned to known parsing failure modes, is still what actually works today.

It depends entirely on where you're applying. The US, UK, Canada, and Australia expect no photo — it can create legal exposure for the employer. Germany and France still commonly include one. The Gulf states and much of Asia expect a fuller personal profile as standard.

Watch for the gap between the intro price and the renewal price — several well-known tools funnel a cheap trial into a $25-30/month auto-renewal. Look for a clearly stated renewal price, an honest free tier, and — if it exists — a real one-time or lifetime option that means what it says.

It depends on the tool, and most don't do great here — an independent 2024 audit found 9 of 12 popular resume builders kept user data for 30-180 days post-deletion, and 4 reserved rights to use it for AI training. Check the actual retention period and AI-training clause before uploading your full career history anywhere.

Not as a structured, portable record. LinkedIn has no open export format — just a GDPR data-dump ZIP of proprietary files, not a reusable CV document. It's still genuinely good for visibility and networking; it's just not a substitute for a real, complete, structured career record.

Yes, and no. Documented bias in LLM-based screening has actually reversed direction across model generations rather than disappearing. Anonymizing a CV (removing name, photo) isn't enough either — models can still infer demographic signals from word choice and writing style. It's also now regulated: the EU AI Act and NYC Local Law 144 both put real obligations on employers using these tools.

Europass is the EU's official CV format — required or preferred for EU civil-service roles, Erasmus+, and cross-border EURES applications. For a private-sector job in Belgium or almost anywhere else, a standard PDF is fine. We generate both from the same profile, so you don't have to decide upfront.

Yes — upload it through the normal CV import flow, PDF or the raw Europass XML file itself. There's no dedicated Europass parser; we don't need one, since the same AI extraction that reads any CV import handles the XML's structure and pulls the real fields out of it.

It means an AI agent or ATS can fully parse, structure, and evaluate it without losing information: real selectable text, not an image; a single-column layout; standard section names; achievements described with enough specificity that a system can actually score them, not just a wall of keywords.

You talk about your experience for however long it takes — most roles run 15 to 30 minutes. We transcribe it with Amazon Transcribe, generate a polished summary with Bedrock, and you review and correct it before any of it gets saved to your profile. No form-filling required.

Yes, via MCP (Model Context Protocol). Claude, or any other MCP-compatible agent, can connect to your Smart CV Writer profile, read your experience, add a new source, run a Fit Check against a job posting, and leave feedback — on your behalf, under your own account's permissions.

A CV is one formatted snapshot, in one format. Your structured career profile is the complete underlying data — every role, skill, achievement, certification, and source you've ever added. You generate CVs from it: a plain PDF for one employer, Europass XML for an EU application, a version slanted toward one specific job.

No. We use Amazon Bedrock to process and summarize your data — Bedrock doesn't use customer input to train its underlying models, and we don't run a separate training pipeline on your information either. Your profile gets processed to generate your CV. That's the extent of it.

Yes. Run a Fit Check against a job posting, then hit "Tailor this CV" — we generate a rewritten version aimed at that specific role, score it against the posting's own requirements, and refine it automatically until it clears your match target (or we run out of attempts). You review and edit the result before it's ever saved or published. Part of Active Tailoring.

PDF, plain text, JSON, JSON Resume, and Europass XML/PDF once your profile passes the Europass completeness check — all generated from the same structured profile. If you've uploaded your own branded Word template, your PDF renders from that instead of our built-in layout.

It reflects what an AI agent or ATS can actually extract and understand from your CV, not a judgment of your career. A low score doesn't mean you're unqualified — it means your CV is hard for a machine to parse. Fix the structure and the score moves; the underlying experience doesn't have to change at all.

Not yet. Your structured profile already has everything a cover letter would draw from — generating one from that same data is on the roadmap, not built.

Not in a dedicated way yet — a recruiter dashboard is coming, in active development. Today, a candidate can already run their own Fit Check against your posting and see exactly where their profile falls short, without you needing anything on your end.

Because it isn't built to. A parser reads the document you submitted — it extracts a URL as a text field, the same as a phone number, but it doesn't fetch and read whatever's at the other end. If something matters for screening, it needs to be described in the CV itself, not one click away from it.

Essentially never, today. Agentic AI that can browse the web exists, but ATS and screening vendors generally don't build CV screening that way — it would mean open-ended research into a candidate's personal life with no clear boundary, closer to surveillance than hiring, and most vendors have no appetite to own that risk. Deeper digging does happen, through disclosed background checks, but only after a shortlist, as a separate, consent-based process — not something quietly folded into the first pass.

Yes — export your data from LinkedIn (Settings & Privacy → Data Privacy → Download your data), then drop the file straight into the import page and we'll structure it into your profile. It's a quick, mostly-automatic process — see the linked guide for the exact click-by-click steps.