Federal Resume Builder for USAJOBS
Upload your resume, or your evals. Pick a live USAJOBS announcement. The system writes the federal resume for that announcement, in OPM’s two-page format, with the fields a rater needs to credit your time. Download it and apply.
Get my free resumeFree for service members, veterans, military spouses, and anyone going federal. Built by a Navy vet who was hired into six federal career fields and reviewed resumes as a hiring manager.
Five steps, and you write none of it
Most veterans don’t get Not Referred because they are unqualified. They get it because the resume doesn’t speak the language federal HR screens for, and rewriting it announcement by announcement is a job nobody has time for. So the system does that part.
Get my free resume1Upload
Your existing resume, or your evaluations. NCOER, OER, FITREP, EPR, OPR, Coast Guard and Space Force forms too. Select every eval at once and they merge into one base resume. There is no step where you type your service history from memory.
2Pick the job
Search live USAJOBS openings ranked against your own resume, or paste an announcement link, or paste its text. Federal Jobs is a full search of its own, and it is the next chapter.
3The system tailors it
One click rewrites your summary, your work experience, and your skills in the announcement’s language, in federal format. You do not do the rewriting, and you do not compare two documents side by side to work out what to change.
4Review what it wrote
Gap analysis returns a minimum-qualification verdict against that announcement, names the experience federal HR cannot credit yet and why, and estimates your page count. Condense to two pages folds older roles into an Earlier Career block, and stops to warn you first about any position that may be holding your qualifying year.
5Download and apply
PDF or Word, in Federal Traditional or the Federal Executive template for SES. Upload it to USAJOBS and apply. The announcement is already on your job tracker.
Step one, in detail
The first screen asks which you have, not what you can remember.
An existing resume
PDF, DOC, DOCX, or plain text. It is read, redacted of anything sensitive, and split into contact details, summary, education, skills, certifications, and every position, which you then review one section at a time. Usually 30 to 60 seconds.
Your evaluations
PDF, JPG, or PNG, as many files as you have. Twelve evaluation formats are recognised across all six branches, including binder PDFs that hold years of evals in one file. Each one gives up its duty title, command, period, and accomplishments, and they merge into a single base resume.
Neither, if you would rather type
Manual entry is the third path, not the first. It exists for people with no document to hand, not as the default.
Step two is a federal job search built for this
Federal Jobs pulls live openings from the same API USAJOBS itself runs on, and ranks every one of them against your own resume rather than against a keyword you typed. Then it hands you the filters the official search does not have.
- 351 federal occupational series in the catalog, 238 GS and 113 Wage Grade, across 58 groups
- 46,829 canonical USAJOBS places for the location box, 42,290 in the US and 250 countries beyond it
- 4,167 military-to-GS crosswalks, covering 1,048 military job codes across every branch
Occupational series
The full OPM catalog, 351 series. The ones matching your resume are already selected when you first open the page; the rest are a search away. Type “cyber” and 2210 comes up, because the series is matched on its resume keywords, not only its title.
Location, and how far around it
A typeahead over 46,829 canonical USAJOBS places, US as “Fort Worth, TX” and overseas as “Sasebo Naval Base, Japan”. Picking a suggestion is the point: USAJOBS matches its own location names exactly, so free text that misses the taxonomy returns nothing and says nothing. Radius is exact location, 25, 50, 100, or 200 miles.
Pay grade
A GS-1 to GS-15 range. Non-GS roles are not thrown away: wage grade, FAA, NAF and SES postings are matched on the salary the grades you picked are actually worth, from the 2026 GS base table.
Work schedule
All six USAJOBS schedule codes plus Other or unknown, always listed whether or not today’s results contain them. Announcement text overrides a miscoded posting: a job coded shift work whose title reads FLX is reclassified intermittent, with the reason on the chip.
Who may apply
Seventeen USAJOBS hiring paths, grouped into eight plain-language choices: the public, veterans, military spouses, Guard and Reserve, individuals with disabilities, students and recent graduates, current or former federal employees, and the special authorities. Postings open only to the current federal workforce carry their own badge.
Agency
Every department in your results, with a count against each one, so a department you will not work for goes away in one tap.
Overseas
One saved option, hide postings that need existing SOFA sponsorship. It appears only when your results contain overseas jobs. What sits behind it is the next chapter.
Pick an opening and Create resume for this job tailors your resume to that announcement and puts the posting on your job tracker. To be straight about what is not there: no clearance filter, no travel filter, no date-posted filter, and remote is used to rank rather than to filter, because the USAJOBS remote flag returns nothing when you search on it.
Search federal jobs freeThe parts that took a year of real complaints to build
Each of these came from a veteran whose search was quietly broken. None of them are adjectives.
Ranked against your resume, not against your keywords
Every posting carries a fit score built from your skills, your years, the series, the title, the location, and the pay, plus a semantic component: the distance between your own record and the announcement, measured as vectors. That last part exists because token matching structurally cannot work here. BMR skill phrases appear word for word in roughly zero percent of federal postings, since resumes and OPM prose share almost no vocabulary. Adding it moved ranking of the postings veterans actually chose from 83.5 to 84.9 percent mean percentile, and from 76.8 to 79.2 percent inside the top quarter. The weight was swept, not guessed.
SOFA status on every overseas posting
Overseas announcements gate on Status of Forces Agreement status, and the USAJOBS search API does not carry that line at all. So the announcement page itself is read, the agency’s own “Clarification from the agency” sentence is pulled out and kept, and each posting gets one of four verdicts: grants SOFA status, open to current federal employees, needs existing SOFA sponsorship, or SOFA not stated. The agency’s exact words sit behind the chip. A veteran living overseas on their own can hide the ones that will never sponsor them, and the job alert stops sending those too.
It tells you when you are searching the wrong series
A hundred grey cards is a search problem, not a qualification problem. When a result list comes back with no skill matches anywhere and a low best score, your resume is scored against the cached announcement corpus grouped by series, and the three series you actually fit are offered with their best achievable match. The case that built it: a Navy avionics technician searching 4749 and 2810, best score 34 percent, no matches at all. The ranker put 2610 Electronic Integrated Systems Mechanic on top at 89 percent.
It rescues a search that returns nothing
Zero results triggers four attempts in order: drop the series filter, fold the location into the keyword, do both, and say on the page which one it fell back to. This is not theoretical. A saved location of “Okinawa” returned zero jobs through the location field and fifteen real Okinawa jobs through the keyword field, and a Fort Worth 0343 search returned zero with the series and thirty-five without it.
It shows the size of the result set before you save the search
As you build the search, a live count reads “N open federal jobs match this right now”. If your series filter takes it to zero, it shows the count without the series and says it will broaden automatically. The reason it exists is a veteran whose saved search returned zero, silently, for weeks.
One search object, four places
The setup screen, the dashboard card, the Federal Jobs page and the email all run the same chain and the same filter test. Uncheck an agency on the page and tomorrow’s email has already dropped it. Nothing is snapshotted, so a saved search cannot quietly go stale against the filters you have since changed.
And it emails you the new ones
Federal job alerts read the search you saved, live. Change a filter on the page this morning and tonight’s email has already dropped what you excluded.
Cadence
Daily or weekly, your choice, and off is a choice too.
What counts as new
A ledger of what has already been sent to you, not the date a posting entered the cache. The first email is a baseline of your top matches; after that only genuinely new announcements arrive.
A quiet day
Zero new matches sends zero email. No digest of yesterday’s jobs.
In the email
Up to ten announcements, each with its fit score, the skills of yours that matched, who may apply, the closing date, and the SOFA verdict when it is overseas.
The button
Build my resume for this, which opens that announcement ready to tailor. Reading it on USAJOBS is the second link, not the first.
What it writes, and why it looks like that
Our founder’s first federal applications came back Not Referred. They were private sector resumes. USAJOBS asks for things no other resume needs, and a missing one can end an application before anybody reads a bullet. The bullets are a different shape too: a rater is matching you against the announcement’s specialized experience statement, so a five-word line gives them nothing to work with. Same person, same job, two formats. The marked lines are the federal-only fields.
Federal Traditional template
Security Clearance: Secret | Citizenship: U.S. Citizen | Veterans Preference: 10-PointFederal only: a rater checks eligibility before anything else
NETWORK ADMINISTRATION- Administered enterprise network infrastructure across classified and unclassified domains for an organization of 1,200 users, sustaining 99.5% system availability. Managed account provisioning, group policy, and distribution lists through Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange Server, resolving more than 150 service requests weekly. Enforced organizational cybersecurity policy and access controls across both environments.
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SECURITY- Implemented Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) across 150 workstations and 12 servers. Conducted recurring vulnerability assessments, remediated findings to compliance benchmarks, and maintained the security documentation reviewed at annual information assurance inspections. Sustained a 98% compliance rating across the assessed systems.
POLICY AND PROCEDURE DEVELOPMENT- Authored eight standard operating procedures governing incident response protocols, communications standards, and shift transition processes for the unit operations center. Coordinated review and approval through senior leadership and trained assigned personnel on the published procedures. Reduced average response coordination time by 15%.
CompTIA Security+ · CompTIA A+
Day, month, and year on every position
BMR prints 13 May 2019, not 05/2019 and not 2019. OPM’s own guidance asks for month and year as the floor; the day removes the last bit of guesswork about how much time you get credited. Years alone leave a rater estimating.
Hours per week, position by position
Federal HR credits your time from each position’s own dates and its own hours. A position with no hours on it may not count toward the specialized experience the announcement asks for, however good the bullets under it are.
Series and grade on any federal position
Held a GS job before? It prints on that position, next to the salary and the hours: GS-11, Series 2210, on one line under the job title. It is how a rater reads your level without hunting for it. The sample here is a first federal application, so there is no prior grade to print.
The supervisor line
Name, contact, and whether they may be contacted, printed under the position when the announcement asks for it and omitted when you say no.
Clearance, citizenship, preference, highest grade
Their own section at the top, because a rater checks eligibility before they read anything else. Veterans’ preference of 5 or 10 points belongs to federal hiring specifically.
Competency headers, not one-line bullets
A federal bullet is a bold, capitalised competency followed by two to four sentences: what you did, the scope, the systems, and the numbers your record actually holds. A rater is matching your experience against the specialized experience statement, and a five-word bullet gives them nothing to match. The private sector one-liner is the wrong shape here, and switching the toggle above shows the same work in both.
Acronyms spelled out
DISA, STIG, DTS, NIPR. The rater may not be prior military and will not decode them for you, so each one is expanded the first time it appears. Ranks and billet titles get civilianised the same way.
The announcement’s language, not yours
HR screens against the specialized experience in the posting, in the posting’s words. A resume that says the same thing differently reads as not qualified. This is the part the tailor does for you.
OPM’s two-page guidance
What USAJOBS enforces, what OPM recommends, and where the rule stops.
Length
Two pages. This is the one USAJOBS enforces.
Margins and type
OPM recommends and USAJOBS does not restrict: in its own words, USAJOBS “will not restrict uploaded resumes to specific font types, sizes, or margins”. BMR ships 0.5 inch margins with 10 point body text on Federal Traditional, and the OPM 11 point floor with 0.8 inch margins on the SES template.
Content
Contact details, then each relevant position with title, employer, start and end dates, hours per week, and series and grade if it was federal. Education, certifications and licences. Then clearance, job-related training, language skills, and eligibility for special programs when they apply.
Exceptions
Title 38 and Hybrid Title 38 positions, mostly VA clinical roles, are exempt; VA says the new requirements do not apply to them. Non-Title 5, judicial and legislative agencies may accept a longer resume through Other Documents when the announcement says how. A longer resume sent without that instruction may not be read.
Before you apply, it tells you whether you qualify
Gap analysis reads the whole announcement, not a keyword digest, and scores your tailored resume against it. It is the step that saves an evening.
Minimum qualification
A verdict against that announcement: meets, borderline, or does not meet, with the requirement it is judging you against, the evidence in your own resume that supports it, and what is missing. Run it before you spend an evening on a posting you cannot be referred for.
Experience HR cannot credit yet
The positions with no hours, no dates, or no scope on them, each with the fix. Creditability is a separate problem from quality, and it is the one that quietly ends applications.
Hard stops
The disqualifiers, called out on their own. A degree requirement you do not meet is not a gap to work on, it is a different job to apply for.
Length and focus
An estimated page count and the positions to hide or condense to get under two pages, before you go looking for a page break.
Condense to two pages, with a guard
Condense to two pages folds your older roles into one Earlier Career block. Before it does, every position you selected is checked against the announcement, and any that may be carrying your qualifying time comes back with a warning: a federal rater credits time per position, from its own dates and hours per week, and an Earlier Career block has neither. The default is to keep those positions where they are. You can override it, but you will know what you are overriding.
What changed in federal hiring in 2025
OPM’s Merit Hiring Plan is the biggest change to federal applications in years. Four parts touch your application.
Two-page limit
Enforced 2025-09-27
Part of OPM’s Merit Hiring Plan. USAJOBS will not let you apply with a resume longer than two pages, and it applies the limit to resumes already sitting in your profile.
Four short essay questions
On public GS-05+ announcements
Required on competitive announcements open to the public at GS-05 and above, except teacher, Wage Grade, and seasonal jobs. Answering is optional, the answers are not scored or rated, and OPM says an applicant who leaves them blank is not disqualified or screened out. The hiring manager reads them the way they would read a cover letter.
Self-rated questionnaires no longer rank you
Since 2025-09-30
The rate-yourself-Expert questionnaire can still screen for minimum qualifications and eligibilities, but agencies may not use it to rate and rank, except at GS-4 and below, on seasonal jobs, and on Federal Wage System jobs filled under Job Element procedures. At least one technical or alternative assessment now sits between you and the certificate.
New ECQs for the Senior Executive Service
OPM guide, August 2025
The executive branch replaced its five Executive Core Qualifications and moved competitive SES hiring to a two-page resume plus a structured interview. The judicial and legislative branches still use the older five.
The four short essay questions
Optional to answer, not scored, and OPM says skipping them does not screen you out. If you do answer, the hiring manager reads them like a cover letter, so write them yourself and keep each one short.
1Constitution and founding principles
How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the Federal government?
One concrete example from your service, your studies, or your life, in your own words.
2Government efficiency
In this role, how would you use your skills and experience to improve government efficiency and effectiveness?
A time you fixed a process, cut waste, or got a better result with the same people.
3Executive orders and policy
How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?
Name one or two that touch the job and say what you would do about them.
4Work ethic
Describe your work ethic and how it would contribute to your success in this position.
Reliability and follow-through, shown, not claimed.
Going for SES, and the qualifications that come with it
OPM’s August 2025 guide rewrote the Executive Core Qualifications for the executive branch and made competitive SES hiring resume-based: two pages, 11 point minimum, 0.8 inch margins, then a structured interview. The judicial and legislative branches still use the older five.
1Commitment to the Rule of Law and the Principles of the American Founding
Knowledge of the American system of government, commitment to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law, and commitment to serve the American people.
2Driving Efficiency
Getting better outcomes from the same time, money, staff, and systems, through budget discipline, operational planning, and technology.
3Merit and Competence
The knowledge, ability, and technical competence to produce work of exceptional quality, reliably.
4Leading People
Leading and inspiring a group toward the organization’s vision, mission, and goals, with a high-performance, high-accountability culture.
5Achieving Results
Delivering individual and organizational results, aligned to the goals set by leadership.
The Federal Executive template carries ECQs and Technical Qualifications as resume sections, picks the right five for the branch you are applying to, and will draft all five from your real work history. Paste the Technical Qualifications out of the announcement and it writes one for each. It refuses rather than invents: when your record does not carry the evidence for a qualification, it says what it needs instead of making something up. Part of the Operator plan.
Popular federal job series
Pick a target series and the OPM qualification language for that series comes with it, so your positions read the way a rater reads them. A few of the ones veterans land in most.
2210
Information Technology Management
0343
Management and Program Analyst
0301
Miscellaneous Administration and Program
1102
Contracting
0201
Human Resources Management
1801
General Inspection, Investigation, Enforcement, and Compliance
0083
Police
0501
Financial Administration and Program
Rank doesn’t set your grade. Scope does.
There is no rank-to-GS table, whatever the forums say. Federal HR credits the scope and complexity of the work you can document, so the same rank lands at very different grades.
An E-6 who supervised a shop of eight and kept the maintenance schedule may document GS-7 to GS-9 work. An E-6 who ran a brigade’s network for 1,200 users, wrote the policy, and briefed the commander may document GS-11 or GS-12 work. Same rank. The resume decides, which is why the words on it matter.
Our founder’s advice, not a federal rule: as an enlisted veteran don’t look below GS-7, as an officer don’t look below GS-9, and for most people with a few years of responsibility GS-11 to GS-13 is the honest target. There is no enlisted ceiling either. An E-9 who ran a directorate-level program can document GS-14 work.
Chief Petty Officer (E-7), Coast Guard
Used the resume for a first-ever USAJOBS application and was selected for a GS-13 position writing policy for the same work he did on active duty.
Petty Officer Second Class (E-5), Navy
Hired a grade up, GS-12 instead of GS-11, on the first resume he ever used from BMR.
Sergeant (E-5), Army
Landed a GS-14 offer and moved straight to negotiating the step.
Federal resume FAQs
Do I have to type my military experience in?
No. Upload your existing resume, or upload your evaluations and let those become the resume. NCOER, OER, FITREP, EPR and OPR forms are all recognised, across all six branches, including binder PDFs that hold years of evals in one file. Select every eval at once and they merge into one base resume. Extraction takes about 30 to 60 seconds, then you review what it read, section by section. Typing everything by hand is the third option, not the first.
Do I have to tailor the resume myself?
No. You pick the announcement and the system rewrites your summary, your work experience, and your skills in that announcement’s language, in federal format, in one click. You review what it wrote and download it. There is no side-by-side exercise where you work out which of your bullets to change.
How does the USAJOBS search work?
Federal Jobs pulls live openings from the same USAJOBS API and ranks every one against your own resume: your skills, your years, the series, the title, the location, the pay, plus a semantic match between your record and the announcement itself. You filter by occupational series, location and radius, pay grade, work schedule, who may apply, agency, and overseas SOFA status. Pick one and Create resume for this job tailors your resume to that announcement and puts it on your job tracker.
What can I filter federal jobs by?
Occupational series from the full 351-series OPM catalog, location from a typeahead of 46,829 canonical USAJOBS places, radius (exact, 25, 50, 100, or 200 miles), a GS-1 to GS-15 pay grade range that also matches non-GS roles by equivalent salary, all six USAJOBS work schedules plus Other or unknown, who may apply across seventeen hiring paths grouped into eight plain choices, agency or department, and an overseas filter that hides postings needing existing SOFA sponsorship. There is no clearance, travel, or date-posted filter, and remote is used to rank rather than to filter, because the USAJOBS remote flag returns nothing when it is searched on.
Can I get emailed when new federal jobs match?
Yes, daily or weekly. The alert reads the search you saved live, so a filter you changed on the page this morning is already applied tonight. New means new to you, tracked in a ledger of what has been sent, and a day with no new matches sends no email at all. Each announcement arrives with its fit score, the skills of yours that matched, who may apply, the closing date, and a button that opens it ready to tailor.
What does a federal bullet point actually look like?
A bold, capitalised competency header, a dash, then two to four sentences: the duties you performed, the scope you carried, the systems you used, and whatever metrics your record actually holds, with every acronym spelled out on first use. For example: NETWORK ADMINISTRATION followed by three sentences on the environment, the user count, the tools, and the availability you sustained. It is not the private sector one-liner. A rater is matching you against the announcement’s specialized experience statement, and a five-word bullet gives them nothing to match against. The builder writes this shape for you and refuses to invent numbers your record does not carry.
Why do the dates say 13 May 2019 instead of 05/2019?
The federal templates print day, month, and year on every position. OPM’s applicant guidance asks for month and year as the minimum, so the full date meets it and leaves a rater nothing to estimate. Hours per week sits on the same position, with the salary and, on federal positions, the pay plan, grade, and series.
How do I know if I actually qualify for an announcement?
Run the gap analysis. It returns a minimum-qualification verdict of meets, borderline, or does not meet against that specific announcement, names the requirement it is judging, quotes the evidence in your own resume, calls out hard stops separately, lists the experience federal HR cannot credit yet with the fix for each, and estimates your page count. It reads the full announcement, not a keyword digest.
What happens when I condense to two pages?
Older positions fold into one Earlier Career block that you control. Before that happens, each selected position is checked against the announcement and anything that may be carrying your qualifying time comes back with a warning, because a rater credits time per position from its own dates and hours and an Earlier Career block has neither. The default is to leave those positions alone.
What changed for federal resumes in 2025?
OPM’s Merit Hiring Plan capped Title 5 federal resumes at two pages, enforced on USAJOBS from 2025-09-27. Public competitive announcements at GS-05 and above carry four short essay questions, which are optional to answer and are not scored or rated. Agencies had until 2025-09-30 to stop using self-rated questionnaires to rate and rank candidates, and now use at least one technical assessment. The executive branch rewrote its SES qualifications and moved competitive SES hiring to a two-page resume with a structured interview.
Are there exceptions to the two-page rule?
Yes. VA says the new requirements do not apply to Title 38 and Hybrid Title 38 positions, which are mostly clinical roles. Non-Title 5 agencies and the judicial and legislative branches may accept a longer resume through the Other Documents field when the announcement says how. A longer resume sent without that instruction may not be reviewed, so read the posting.
What are the four essay questions for federal jobs?
Constitution and founding principles, government efficiency, executive orders and policy priorities, and work ethic. OPM requires agencies to ask them on competitive announcements open to the public at GS-05 and above. Answering is optional, the answers are not scored or rated, and an applicant who skips them is not disqualified or screened out. When you do answer, they go to the hiring manager with your packet, like a cover letter.
What are the new Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs)?
For the executive branch, OPM’s August 2025 guide replaced the five long-standing ECQs with: Commitment to the Rule of Law and the Principles of the American Founding, Driving Efficiency, Merit and Competence, Leading People, and Achieving Results. Competitive SES hiring now runs on a two-page resume (11 point minimum, 0.8 inch margins) and a structured interview instead of ten-page narratives. The judicial and legislative branches did not adopt the rewrite and still use Leading Change, Leading People, Results Driven, Business Acumen, and Building Coalitions. The Federal Executive template picks the right five for the branch and can draft all of them, and your Technical Qualifications, from your real work history.
Is this federal resume builder free?
Yes. You get two tailored resumes free, one in federal format and one for the private sector, and you can download both. Pro is $30 a month and is for tailoring to many announcements.
What GS grade should I aim for?
Grade follows the scope and complexity of the work you can document, not your rank. A lot of service members with a few years of responsibility can document GS-11 to GS-13 work, and our founder’s advice is not to look below GS-7 as an enlisted veteran or GS-9 as an officer. The builder supports every grade from GS-5 through GS-15 and the SES.
How long does it take to build a federal resume?
Uploading and reviewing your base resume is the long part, and most people finish it in 15 to 20 minutes. After that, tailoring to a new announcement is one click and a couple of minutes of review.
Ready for a federal career?
24,538 veterans and military spouses have used the builder, for federal jobs and civilian ones. Two tailored resumes are free, one of them in federal format, and the federal job search is free to use before you build anything.