Why I Built Cooked: Tailor Your CV to Any Job Without Paying $50 a Month
By Nwuba Joshua · Updated 9 November 2026
Most job applications never reach a person. Companies run CVs through applicant tracking systems (ATS) like Workday, Greenhouse and Lever, and recruiters search those systems for the exact words in their job post. If your CV says "worked with clients" and the job says "stakeholder management", you can be skipped even when you're qualified.
The fix is simple but tedious: rewrite your CV for every job, using that job's wording. I built Cooked because I couldn't find a way to do that quickly, honestly and cheaply.
Tailoring by hand doesn't scale
Doing it properly means reading the job post line by line, picking out the skills and tools it screens for, then rewriting your summary, skills and bullets to match. That's close to an hour per application. When you're applying to dozens of jobs, most people give up and send the same CV everywhere, which is exactly what gets filtered out.
Tools that help exist, but the popular ones are built around monthly subscriptions, and Jobscan's paid plan costs around $50 a month. That's a lot to ask of someone who's between jobs.
How Cooked works
Paste a job link from LinkedIn, Indeed or a company careers page and add your CV. In under a minute, Cooked rewrites your CV around the keywords that role screens for, and writes a matching cover letter. You see an ATS score and the keywords you're still missing, before and after.
The rule I wouldn't break: no invented experience
AI is very good at writing confident text, which is dangerous on a CV. A faked skill might get you past a filter, but it falls apart the moment an interviewer asks about it.
- Cooked only rewrites what's already in your CV: rewording, reordering and using the job's terms where your experience supports them.
- Every rewritten bullet shows which line of your original CV it came from, so you can check that nothing was made up.
- If the job asks for a skill you don't have, it's listed as a gap instead of written in.
What else is in it
- 8 ATS-friendly templates: single column, standard headings and real text, the format ATS software reads most reliably.
- A remote job board with roles from 80+ companies, filtered by where you can work: worldwide, Europe, Americas, Asia-Pacific or Africa.
- One-click tailoring to any listing, company research and likely interview questions on Pro.
- A free ATS checker that needs no account.
Pricing
Free to try: 3 tailored CVs a day, no credit card needed. Downloading a tailored CV as a PDF costs $2.99, or Pro is $9.99 a month for unlimited CVs and everything above. I wanted the price of one CV to be less than a coffee, and Pro to cost a fraction of the big subscriptions.
What's next
I'm building Cooked in public and shipping changes every week, most of them from user feedback. If something is confusing, missing or broken, tell me. I read and reply to everything, on X at @fleetyre77 or by email.
See how your current CV scores against a job in 15 seconds. Free, no sign-up.
Check my CV free