About TakeMeUp.cv
Built by someone who's read a lot of CVs.
Hi, I'm Bogdan. I've spent the last 28 years in executive roles — CEO twice, CTO twice, Head of Products at two London software companies in between. I started my first company in 1998, grew it to forty engineers, sold it to a US venture group in 2001, and have been building, hiring, and (occasionally) firing people ever since. Today I run a European telecom and SaaS group with offices in twelve countries.
Along the way I've read more CVs than I can count. Thousands, easily — probably tens of thousands. I've sat across the table from candidates good and bad, hired people who turned out brilliant, hired people who turned out to be a mistake, and learned (slowly) why those two outcomes don't always look different on paper.
TakeMeUp.cv is what I'd hand a candidate if they asked me how to actually get past a recruiter like me.
Why this exists
Most CV builders are designed by people who've never hired anyone. They optimise for "looking professional" — tidy fonts, columned layouts, bullet points that sound important but say nothing. I've sat through enough screening calls to know that's exactly the kind of CV recruiters scroll past in three seconds.
What actually decides whether a recruiter reads your CV: a structure their ATS can parse, achievements with real numbers, role progression that makes sense, and language that sounds like a human wrote it. That's the whole game. None of it is mysterious — it's just rarely taught, and almost never built into the tools. So I built one that bakes it in.
A few things 25+ years of hiring taught me
Recruiters spend six seconds on the first scan. Not metaphorically — six actual seconds. If your name, current role, and a clear sense of trajectory aren't visible in that window, you're out. The templates here put the parser-friendly stuff at the top and stay ATS-safe by default.
"Responsible for" kills more applications than typos. It's the verbal tic of someone describing a job, not someone who did it. Concrete verbs and numbers — "shipped", "led 8 engineers", "reduced support tickets by 75%" — survive the scan. "Responsible for daily operations" doesn't.
Tailoring beats length. A two-page CV that mirrors the job description's exact phrasing beats a three-page CV that lists everything you've ever done. Every paid surface here — rewrite, cover letter, ATS audit, match — is about precision, not adding more.
Most cover letters are worse than no cover letter. Generic openings, three paragraphs of "I am writing to express my interest", zero connection to the role. Our generator goes the other way: it reads the actual job description, finds the genuine overlap with your CV, and writes in your voice — not the LinkedIn-influencer voice.
Europass is a useful format, used badly. If you're applying to EU institutions, public-sector roles, or research positions in Continental Europe, you need it. If you're applying to a UK startup, it's actively wrong. The product knows when to recommend each.
What this product does differently
- No invented metrics. The AI rewrites your bullets — it doesn't fabricate numbers you didn't give it. Other tools will quietly add "increased revenue by 30%" to anything. Recruiters notice. They check.
- Twelve EU languages, real translations. Not Google-translated chrome. Each locale's CV-format conventions are built in — when to include a photo, whether to date education, how language proficiency is scored.
- An honest free tier. ATS check, job-description match, GDPR audit, Europass export — free, no card, no email. The paid surfaces are paid because they burn AI tokens, not because the free version is artificially crippled.
- A "Roast my CV" mode. Half of all bad CVs would be fixed if someone honest read them out loud. Now the AI does it.
A few things I'm not going to pretend
The product is built by one person. I read every support email myself. If something is broken, you'll hear back from me — usually within a day, sometimes within an hour. There's no support team to escalate you to, no chatbot tier to fight through. That's a feature, until it isn't.
I'm also not going to claim AI fixes every CV. It doesn't. It's a sharp scalpel for some specific surgeries — rewriting bullets, matching keywords, drafting a cover letter, exporting a clean Europass file. For the deeper stuff — what role you should actually pursue, whether your story makes sense — you still need a human. Preferably one who's hired thousands. (Hi.)
Say hi
Push back on anything you read here, tell me something's broken, or argue about CV best practices — contact@takemeup.cv. I answer.