You’ve got eight CVs to send to clients and 40 minutes to get them all into your agency’s house style. Manually fixing fonts, margins, and bullet points in Word feels like a waste of time—and one small slip can mess up the whole layout. Here’s how to save time and keep your CVs consistent without the headache.
TL;DR
Manual reformatting wastes time and introduces errors. Distill reformats CVs to your agency’s house style in under a minute, keeping content intact and removing formatting headaches. Common mistakes include tables, inconsistent fonts, and broken bullet points. Avoid them to reduce client complaints and ATS errors.
Why house-style CVs matter
Your agency’s house style isn’t just about looking good. It sets the standard for readability and professionalism. Clients expect CVs that match their ATS requirements and their brand guidelines. Consistent formatting:
- Helps ATS parse CVs correctly, reducing errors like scrambled contact details or misplaced skills.
- Saves recruiters and clients time by presenting information clearly.
- Reflects well on your agency’s attention to detail.
Without it, you risk CVs getting rejected or misread by systems, and clients questioning your quality.
The manual way — and why it takes forever
Most recruiters open each CV in Word and start tweaking fonts, margins, spacing, bullet points, and headings. You might:
- Replace odd fonts with your house style font.
- Adjust margins to fit your standard page layout.
- Fix bullet points that turned into squares or dashes.
- Remove tables or convert them to plain text.
All this takes around 5 minutes per CV if you’re quick. Multiply that by 20 CVs a week and it’s hours lost. And if you’re rushing, things break:
- Tables shift the layout or confuse ATS.
- Copy/paste from PDFs adds strange formatting.
- Bullet points become inconsistent.
- Headers and footers get lost or duplicated.
Manual reformatting also risks losing important content or candidate details if you’re not careful.
Step-by-step: reformatting in under a minute with Distill
Distill removes the guesswork and speed-drags. Here’s how it works:
- Upload or forward your candidate’s CV to Distill.
- Distill strips out problematic formatting: tables, images, inconsistent fonts.
- It applies your agency’s house style template automatically.
- You get back a clean, standardised Word document ready to send.
The whole process takes about 30 seconds per CV. You keep all the candidate’s content—skills, jobs, dates—intact without manual fiddling.
Why Distill works fast
- No manual font replacements or margin tweaks.
- Removes tables that break ATS parsing.
- Standardises bullet points and section headings.
- Strips personal details if needed for anonymised submissions.
If you’re sending 20+ CVs a week to clients with strict formatting, this saves hours and reduces errors.
Common formatting mistakes to watch for
Even with tools, watch out for these traps:
- Tables: They look neat but scramble ATS parsing. Remove or convert to plain text.
- Inconsistent fonts: Mixing fonts leads to messy layouts. Stick to one font family, size 11 or 12.
- Bullet points: Using special characters or different styles breaks formatting. Use simple, standard bullets.
- Line spacing: Extra spacing between lines or paragraphs can inflate CV length and confuse ATS.
- Headers and footers: Candidate info in headers can get lost during conversion or printing.
- Images and logos: These don’t parse and often cause ATS errors. Remove or replace with plain text.
- Hyperlinks: Broken or excessive links distract ATS and clients. Keep URLs simple or remove.
Fixing these manually takes time and introduces risk. Automating with Distill avoids them upfront.
FAQ
Can I keep tables if my client insists on them?
Tables look tidy but cause parsing issues in many ATS, including Bullhorn and Bullseye. The safer bet is plain text. If your client insists, warn them about potential errors.
What if the candidate’s CV is a PDF?
Distill converts most PDFs to Word before reformatting, removing embedded formatting issues. Complex PDFs with graphics may need manual review.
Will Distill change the candidate’s wording or layout?
No. Distill only affects formatting, not content or wording. It preserves job descriptions, dates, and skills exactly.
Can I customise the house style Distill applies?
Yes. You upload your agency’s template once, including fonts, margins, bullet points, and headings. Distill uses that for all CVs.
Is Distill compatible with all ATS?
Distill outputs standard Word documents designed to meet common ATS requirements but doesn’t integrate directly with ATS systems. It’s a preprocessing step.
If you spend more time fixing CV formatting than sourcing candidates, it’s time to automate. Try Distill free — reformat CVs to your agency house style in 30 seconds, every time.