Reactive Resume

Reactive Resume is the answer to a specific, painful problem: every commercial resume builder owns your data, charges a subscription to download PDF, and produces output that looks identical to every other user on their platform. Academic-to-industry transitions are already a formatting minefield — your dissertation committee never cared about one-page rules, but a biotech recruiter absolutely does.

What it does well

The real-time preview is genuinely useful for the spacing obsessives in this audience (you know who you are). The template system separates content from presentation cleanly, which means you can write your resume data once in JSON and swap templates without re-entering anything. The ATS-friendly templates avoid the invisible text tricks and table layouts that get you rejected before a human sees you.

Self-hosted deployment via Docker takes about ten minutes. Once running, your resume data stays on your machine. There is a hosted version at rxresu.me if you do not want to self-host.

Who it is for

PhDs and MS holders rewriting academic CVs into industry resumes. The 12-page CV becomes a 1-2 page resume, and having a clean tool that does not punish you for changing the format repeatedly is valuable. Also useful for the consulting track — different clients want different resume styles, and having templated variants is practical.

Limitations

The template selection is narrower than some commercial tools. If you need a highly customized design, you may hit its limits. For most industry job searches, the defaults are appropriate.