How your feedback drove what we built

I want to give you a straight look at what we have been building, because most companies only tell you when something breaks, not when someone spent a weeks trying to make your life a little easier. These past few weeks was one of the busiest we have had since we started cvitae, and I want to walk you through it the way it actually happened, not the way a press release would tell it.

Job hunting is hard enough without your tools working against you. That is the whole reason cvitae exists. I have watched people spend hours fighting with formatting in Word instead of thinking about what they actually did at their last job. I have watched people hide their best work behind a CV that looks like every other CV, because the tools available to them never gave them a real design. And I have watched people freeze the moment a recruiter asks for references, because suddenly their personal safety and their privacy are on the line too. Every feature this week came from one of those moments.

Making the first step easier, not harder

We spent a lot of time on onboarding. If you are building a CV for the first time, or the first time in years, staring at a blank page is the worst part. So Guided Mode now walks you through your CV one question at a time instead of dropping a form on you and hoping for the best. Name your CV first (it sounds small, but naming something makes it feel real and yours). Tell us about yourself. Tell us how to reach you. Write a summary, even a rough one, we will help you sharpen it later. Add your experience, your education, your skills. Pick a look you actually like. Then we show you an arrival screen, a real moment where you see your CV strength score and feel like you actually built something, because you did.

None of this is about making the software look clever. It is about making sure the person on the other end, tired after a long day of job hunting, does not give up halfway through.

AI suggestions that add value instead of noise

Our AI Match Score and suggestions system got a lot of attention this week too, and I want to be honest about what changed and why.

Up until now, our AI could tell you what to add. A missing skill, a stronger bullet point, a sharper summary line. That is useful, but it is only half the problem. A CV packed with every skill you have ever touched and every task you have ever done is not a strong CV, it is a wall of text a recruiter will skim past in six seconds. So this week we taught our AI to also tell you what to cut. If a skill on your CV has nothing to do with the job you are chasing, or a bullet point is just filler that does not say anything about your impact, we flag it and offer to remove it. You still have to say yes. We never touch your CV without your permission, and we never will. But now the system actually helps you get sharper, not just longer.

We also rebuilt how those suggestions are shown to you, card by card, with a real before and after, so you always know exactly what is about to change and why, before you apply it.

And when something goes wrong on our end, like the day our AI provider hit a rate limit under load, I do no t think you should ever have to read a complicated or mysterious error message. So we rewrote every error message our AI suggestions can show you in plain language. If we are running slow, we tell you we are running slow and ask you to try again in a few seconds. If you have hit your weekly limit, we tell you exactly when it resets. Software fails sometimes. There is no excuse for making the person using it feel stupid or ignored when it does.

A website that finally looks like what we are building

We also gave the homepage a real design pass this week. A proper feature showcase instead of a wall of icons, real product mockups so you can actually see what you are getting instead of reading about it, and a much more premium first impression across the site. If we are asking you to trust us with your CV and your job search, the least we can do is make our own front door feel like a place worth trusting.

The smaller things

A few smaller updates worth mentioning, because they all came from the same place. You can now upload a CV you already have, PDF or Word document, and we will read it and rebuild it inside cvitae for you, so you are not starting from nothing. We added a proper References section, with the same privacy protection your own contact details already get: your reference's name and role are always visible, but their number stays private until you approve a request. And when you go to create a new CV, we now ask if you want to duplicate one you already have, start from scratch, or upload an existing one, instead of assuming.

None of these are individually massive. Together, they are weeks of genuinely taking in feedback from users and trying to remove friction from one of the most stressful parts of anyone's life: looking for work.

I built cvitae because I believe a good CV should not be a privilege reserved for people who can afford a designer or a career coach. I am proud of what got shipped this week, and I am already looking at what comes next. Thank you for trusting us with something as personal as your career.

Craig

Founder, cvitae