For months now, AI has been helping businesses complete tasks, saving them valuable time and money – but it’s also great at helping employees secure new jobs by building them resumes.
Resume building can be a long, arduous process. Knowing precisely how to showcase your experience and present yourself as a great fit for any job isn’t an easy task. But, as with many things, that’s where AI can now help you out.
In this guide, you’ll find out why Zety is the best AI resume builder, how its closest competitors stack up, and how to use ChatGPT to improve your resume.
What Is an AI Resume Builder?
An AI resume builder is any program or service that utilizes artificial intelligence to automate the resume-building experience for users.
With an AI resume builder, you simply have to input your qualifications and experience, and the software will take care of all of the design and formatting duties. Some of the more sophisticated AI resume builders currently available can auto-generate text, and others will analyze your resume and suggest improvements.
Along with dedicated AI resume builders, you can also ask generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard to write specific aspects of your resume, provide examples of good resumes and make aesthetic recommendations, but they don’t have design functionalities.
The Seven Best Resume Builders
Below, we’ve reviewed the top 7 resume builders with expansive paid plans. A lot of them, like Enhancv, also have free plans – which we’ll discuss later on in this article.
1. Zety Resume Builder
Zety Resume Builder has a wide range of templates and color schemes to choose from. Impressively, it’ll auto-generate relevant text for the different sections of your resume. Even if you end up editing it, it’s often easier to start with something and work from there, rather than a blank slate.
Overall, Zety is very easy to use. We didn’t run into any problems while testing it, and found the overall building process to be much quicker than the likes of Teal, Novoresume, and Rezi.
What’s more, the “final summary” section is really intuitive – you can edit any part of the resume by just clicking on it. If you want to change something, it’ll take you back to the section of the building journey where you want to make the change.
All in all, our mock resume took about 15 minutes to build. This is really, really quick, and almost all of the copy was generated by Zety, which only tasked us with filling in the bare minimum needed to make it personalizable.
However, Zety costs $2.70 for 14-day access, during which you can do unlimited printing and downloading. If you’d like monthly access, it’ll cost you $5.95.
2. KickResume
KickResume’s setup process starts with a conversation with an AI chatbot, which asks you for your name and your job title. After that, you’ll have a resume generated for you with some mock text, which provides a good foundation to build on.
KickResume has an AI toolbox that will analyze your resume and then award you a score out of 100. If you upgrade to Premium, however, you’ll unlock more in-depth feedback that you can action instantly.
KickResume is one of the only resume builders on this list with a live chat function – which comes in handy if you get stuck with anything.
Along with a limited free plan, KickResume has a $5 per month yearly plan, a $12 per month quarterly plan and a $19 per month monthly plan.
3. Resumaker.ai
Resumaker.ai is an AI resume builder that will generate an entire resume for you from scratch if you select the “AI writer” option when you’re setting up.
Resumaker.ai told us that over 1300 resumes had been built using the software on the day we tested it – so it’s clearly quite popular with job hunters. You can probably see why if you look at the below image – Resumaker.ai generated a pretty solid foundation for a resume for a promoter, which is the job we chose from its drop-down menu when we tested it.
If you want to download your resume, however, you’ll have to pay a 7-day access fee of $0.99.
A professional plan, which will grant you access to premium templates and a spell checker, costs $23.75 for 3 months. The expert plan, on the other hand, is $45.75 for half a year and comes with unlimited downloads.
4. MyPerfectResume
MyPerfectResume looks a little bit like our top-rated AI resume builder, Zety – in fact, the initial setup screen is almost identical. You’ll get almost 40 templates to choose from with this AI resume builder, which is a lot more than some of the other providers on this list.
MyPerfectResume provides a lot of prompts, suggestions, and AI-generated copy for your resume, which means it’s a much quicker process for resume building than a standard resume builder, or just doing it from scratch yourself.
You do have to pay to download your final resume, however, much like Zety, MyPerfectResume will grant you access to premium features like a resume checker if you purchase a subscription.
A 14-day full-access subscription costs just $2.70, whereas a monthly subscription is available for $5.95.
4. Rezi
Rezi is geared towards customers who want to make a range of resumes, rather than just one – it has a dashboard where you can view all of your resumes side by side.
One unique thing about Rezi is the video tutorial that accompanies all the different parts of your resume that you’ll build. It also has an AI-powered job-matching tool that’s included but is currently in Beta.
However, to unlock the AI resume writer, AI cover letter writer, and various other useful features, you’ll need to pay for a premium subscription, which starts from $19 per month on the quarterly plan. If you just want to pay for one month, however, it’ll set you back $29.
You can also purchase “AI credits” separately which can be used to activate these types of features within the software.
5. Novoresume
Novoresume doesn’t ask for much information when you sign up – all you have to do is select a template. In this sense, it was pretty quick to get going.
Although not much of the information is filled in for you automatically, Novoresume does provide a variety of optimization suggestions for each section of your resume, as well as tips on what to write and examples of what you could put.
However, there aren’t many more advanced AI capabilities other than that – but we did like how simple the editor provided by Novoresume was. It’s worth noting that a lot of the templates are reserved exclusively for premium members.
Novoresume has a limited free plan that you can use to make one single-page resume. Premium plans start from $19.99 per month and will let you create a ten-page resume, using more fonts and color themes, and create multiple versions with the same information.
6. Enhancv
Enhancv is a free AI resume builder that will construct a resume from a selection of pre-determined templates, which all look very professional. It’s definitely quality over quantity here, which can’t be said for every resume builder. You will, however, have to make an account if you want to download your finished resume.
The setup process is quite short. After clicking “Build Your Resume” we were introduced to Julia, a “personal resume expert”, who guides you through the initial steps. Although it’s a very basic addition to the standard AI resume-building experience, it did make it feel a little more personable and human-led.
Once you’ve entered some information, you’ll have your resume template generated, which you’ll have to go on to fill in. Although it’s very straightforward, Enhancv loses marks by not automating more of the process. Therefore, it still took us a while to finish.
Enhancv has a free plan that lets you build Two resumes/CVs and cover letters, but there’s also a $24.99 per month monthly plan, a $16.66 per month pro quarterly plan, and a semi-annual plan for $13.32 per month.
7. Teal
Teal is a resume builder that exclusively contains templates that are ATS-proven, which just means they’re amenable to the applicant tracking systems many companies use to process resumes and CVs.
Although you’ll have to input pretty much all of the text for your resume yourself, Teal does use AI to analyze the content of your resume and provide both structural and keyword-based feedback.
Another useful Teal feature is the “Work Styles” area, which will take you through a quiz on your traits and provide you with insights on how your strengths and weaknesses will impact different aspects of the job-finding process. This is useful to know when you’re building your resume.
Along with its resume builder, Teal also has a Chrome extension which will let you bookmark jobs from the likes of LinkedIn and Indeed, automatically source salary information from job descriptions, highlight skills and keywords from Job Description, and send you follow-up reminders.
Teal’s premium version, Teal+, costs $9 per week, $29 per month, or $79 for three months. If you upgrade, you’ll get a more in-depth analysis of your resumes.
The Top Free AI Resume Builders
Along with the subscription-based AI resume builders reviewed above, there are some out there that you can use completely free of charge.
Jobscan
Jobscan isn’t a resume builder by trade – instead, it can scan already-built resumes and optimize them for specific job roles. However, it also provides an AI resume builder that you can use for free.
Like Teal, Jobscan’s AI resume builder will format your resume so it’s amenable to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) which automate much of the initial selection process. Jobscan also says that its resumes templates are “universal” and will autofill into any job application.
Resumake
This AI resume builder requires you to input quite a lot more information than some of the others on this list – the only automated bit is the formatting. There are nine templates to choose from, but they’re all pretty similar.
However, Resumake has a sleek interface, is very easy to use and you can instantly download your finished resume as a PDF after you’re finished with the final touches.
Paid AI resume builders with free plans
Almost all of the AI resume builders featured on our paid list have free plans worth checking out. For instance, Novoresume, Teal, and Enhancv have limited free plans you can take advantage of. Other tools, like Resumaker.ai, offer week-long access programs for a very small amount of money.
Novoresume will let you build one single-page resume using their pre-defined layouts. You won’t be able to create multiple versions or access the provider’s premium templates, however, but if you just need a simple resume, it’s worth a look.
Teal’s free version, despite costing nothing, still has a significant number of features, which we’ve discussed earlier on in the article. You’ll still be able to use its analysis tools and access the Work Styles area without purchasing a subscription.
Enhancv, on the other hand, will let you build two resumes with basic resume sections – although you’ll have access to all the software’s design tools, which isn’t all that usual for a free AI resume builder.
Can ChatGPT Improve My Resume?
Although ChatGPT won’t spit out a fully formed resume for you, it can certainly help you improve aspects of your resume, provided you’re using the correct ChatGPT prompts to help you.
You can, for instance, paste your resume into ChatGPT and ask it to make some suggestions on how to optimize it for specific roles, or how to showcase your experience in a more impressive (yet still truthful) light. It’s particularly good at making linguistic suggestions and you can ask the chatbot to paraphrase your sentences so that they sound more resume-appropriate and professional.
However, we’d strongly recommend reading through OpenAI’s privacy policy first – as well as other chatbots – before you paste any personal information into them. The same goes for the AI resume builders on this list.
