How RemakeCV's AI formatting works
RemakeCV extracts text from the CV, uses AI to identify roles, employers, dates and bullets as structured data, then renders that data into your agency template.
RemakeCV formats a CV in three stages. First it extracts raw text from the document, using OCR when there is no text layer. Then an AI model parses that text into structured fields — employers, job titles, date ranges, bullet points, education, skills. Finally those fields are rendered into your agency's template.
Stage 1: text extraction
RemakeCV first has to turn a document into text.
- DOCX and DOC carry real structure — the paragraphs, tables and headings are all machine-readable. This is the most reliable input.
- Text-based PDFs have a text layer, but no structure. The text has to be reassembled from positioned fragments, which is why column order can be ambiguous.
- Scanned PDFs have no text at all. RemakeCV runs optical character recognition over the page images and works from the recognised text.
The CV records which path it took as processing_method: text or image.
Stage 2: structured parsing
This is where the real work happens. The extracted text is a flat wall of words; the AI's job is to decide what each part is.
For each role it identifies the employer, the job title, the location, the date range, and the bullet points that belong to that role. It does the same for education, qualifications, certifications and skills.
Two problems make this genuinely hard:
- Attribution. When a candidate has held three roles at the same employer, the bullets under the second role must not be attached to the first. When a CV lists a client name next to an employer, the employer must win.
- Reading order. In a two-column layout, naive extraction interleaves the columns. The parser has to recover the order a human would read.
The parser preserves the candidate's wording. It decides where text goes, not what it says. If you want the language changed, that is a separate opt-in step — see first-person neutralisation.
Stage 3: rendering into your template
The structured data is written into your agency template — your fonts, your colours, your section order, your headings, your date format. Because the data is structured rather than copied, the same candidate renders identically into any template you own.
This is also why switching template is cheap: the parse is already done, so regenerating into a different template costs nothing and does not consume a credit.
How does it handle difficult source documents?
Real candidate CVs arrive in every possible shape, and the pipeline is built for that rather than for tidy inputs:
| Source | How RemakeCV handles it |
|---|---|
| Two-column and sidebar layouts | Re-read in the order a person would read them, before parsing |
| Scanned and photographed documents | Recognised page by page, including names held in header graphics |
| Several roles at one employer | Each role's bullets attributed to the role they belong to |
| Non-standard date formats | Normalised so dates read consistently across the whole CV |
| Unusual section headings | Matched to the section they correspond to |
| Continuous-scroll exports from Canva or Notion | Sliced, read and stitched back together |
Anything you do want to adjust is a click in the editor — see reviewing and editing — and reprocessing never costs a credit.
What the pipeline guarantees
These are hard constraints in the pipeline, not tendencies — and they are what makes the output safe to put in front of a client:
- No invented content. Employment history, dates and qualifications come from the source CV and nowhere else.
- No silent removal. Content is only dropped when you ask for anonymisation.
- No meaning drift. A bullet point is moved, never reworded, unless you opt into a feature that rewrites.
Anything you want to add or change is available in the editor — see adjusting a formatted CV.
Frequently asked questions
- Does the AI rewrite the candidate's words?
- No. The extraction step preserves the candidate's own wording. Bullet points are moved, not rewritten. The only features that generate new text are the candidate summary, the cover message and first-person neutralisation, and each is opt-in.
- Which AI model does RemakeCV use?
- RemakeCV runs on OpenAI's models under an enterprise agreement with zero data retention. Candidate data is not retained by OpenAI after processing and is never used to train models. EU data residency is available on request.
- Is my candidate data used to train AI models?
- No. RemakeCV's enterprise agreement with OpenAI carries zero data retention: candidate CVs are processed to produce your formatted document, are not retained afterwards, and are never used to train models. See security and sub-processors.
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