How CV Once is tested

The builder makes two kinds of promise: that its checks flag what they say they flag, and that what you export is complete, readable and in order. Both are tested on every build, and the results below are from this build (26 October 2026).

The checks

The checks are plain pattern rules in /static/checks.js. They run in your browser as you type, with no AI and no network, and the same file runs at build time over the test set below and the example CVs. "Issues" are things a recruiter would very likely notice. "Notes" are worth a second look, but are often fine.

Validation of the checks

Every build runs the checks over a labelled test set of 95 cases written for this purpose. Each case says which checks must fire and which must not, including hard cases that look like a match and aren't ("the US market", "Helpdesk lead", "helped" mid-sentence, a negative number that starts with a hyphen, overlapping roles). The build fails if any core case disagrees.

Result: 92 of 92 core cases pass, plus 3 documented known limits that are expected to fail.

The 10 example CVs are also checked on every build and must have no issue-level findings.

How dates are read

Export tests

Text, Markdown and JSON

For each example CV, every build checks that: exporting to CV Once JSON and importing it again gives an identical CV; every bullet appears in the plain-text export, in the same order as on the page; every bullet appears in the Markdown export; and a round trip through the JSON Resume format keeps the contact details, summary and every bullet.

JSON Resume has no place for some CV Once fields (section titles, hidden entries, template and colour settings, the photo), so use CV Once's own JSON for backups.

PDF: every template on A4 and Letter

Method: each example CV is opened in the builder in headless Chrome (Chrome/124.0.6367.78), switched to each template and paper size, and printed with the same print stylesheet you get when you choose "Save as PDF". Each PDF is then checked with poppler's pdfinfo and pdftotext:

• Page size is exactly A4 (595 × 842 pt) or Letter (612 × 792 pt).
• Selectable text: every line of the CV (name, every heading, title, date and bullet) is found in the extracted text. A scanned or image-only PDF would score zero.
• Reading order: those lines appear in the extracted text in the order they appear in the CV, using pdftotext's default reading-order mode, which is close to how parsers read a PDF.
• Nothing off the page: no word's bounding box (pdftotext -bbox) falls outside the page or into the printed margin, and, measured in the page itself at the exact printable width, no element is wider than the page. The second test matters because Chrome quietly shrinks an over-wide page to fit when printing, which leaves the PDF tidy but the text smaller than intended.

Reading order is judged block by block: the header and each section must come out of the PDF in order and in one piece, and blocks may not interleave on a page, which is what happens when a parser mixes two columns or lifts a right-aligned date away from its job. A two-column CV that runs onto a second page is read page by page, so a section that breaks across pages may have the side column between its two parts.

Run 2026-10-26: 160 of 160 PDFs pass all four checks (10 CVs × 8 templates × 2 paper sizes).

Negative controls. To show the test can fail, every run also prints deliberately broken versions of one CV, which must be caught: bullets displayed in reverse order (caught), lines that refuse to wrap and run off the page (caught), dates right-aligned on the title line, an earlier CV Once design (caught). The last one is why the templates now keep dates next to the role: in our first tests, pdftotext read some right-aligned dates as a separate column and printed them after the next section.

Fonts: templates use the fonts on your device (Helvetica or Arial for sans-serif, Charter or Georgia for serif, with open-source fallbacks). The test machine used FreeSans and FreeSerif, so page counts on your device may differ slightly; the builder measures the page count in your own browser.

Known limits

• Grew the team from scratch: 'from scratch' implies no number is possible; the rule can't tell.
• Made coffee for the partners: weak, but not on the list: the rules only know listed phrases.
• Experienced and dependable professional who always goes the extra mile.: 'goes the extra mile' isn't in the cliché list.
• The rules have no grammar and no meaning: they can't tell a strong sentence that happens to start with "Helped" from a weak one. They flag patterns; you decide.
• English only, tuned on UK, Irish and North American conventions.
• The page count in the builder is measured in your browser before printing. Different browsers break pages slightly differently, so check the PDF preview before you send.
• A clean result doesn't make a CV good. The checks catch wording; what you achieved is up to you.

Sources and licences

Everything on CV Once is original: the templates, the check rules and word lists, the guides, the example CVs and the illustrations. The example CVs describe fictional people; their employers, schools and numbers are invented. Statements about national conventions are written from general knowledge of hiring practice and marked as conventions, which vary by employer and sector. Named laws (the UK Equality Act 2010, US Title VII, the ADEA and ADA, the EU GDPR) are referred to only in general terms; nothing here is legal advice.

The JSON Resume import and export follow the open JSON Resume schema (MIT licence). Language levels refer to the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The site uses no third-party data, scripts, fonts or images.