What a primary resume is

One resume in your library can carry a blue Primary star. FirstResume sorts it to the top when you pick a base resume to tailor from, and it is the one to reach for when somebody asks for your CV. There is one at a time: mark another and the star moves.

The app puts it this way: "Your Primary Resume is your favourite resume, labelled as "Primary Resume" so you can quickly find it from the list to download or when used for future tailoring. You may change your Primary Resume anytime you want."

Three places to set it

• Resume Builder: the Primary column shows a blue Primary pill on the current one and a quiet Set as Primary button on every other row. Press it.
• The editor: open the resume, press the ⋯ menu, choose Set as Primary.
• The download dialog: press Download, choose Download PDF, and switch on Set as Primary Resume? before Confirm. The resume you are about to send an employer is often the one you want as your default anyway.

Nothing else about either resume changes when the star moves.

Which one to pick

Your general, untailored resume makes the better default. A tailored copy is written around one posting: its vocabulary, its ordering and the skills it leads with all belong to that job, which makes a poor starting point for the next one and a poor thing to hand to anyone who asks.

After a round of tailoring, glance at the Primary column. Tailoring adds rows to the table, so check the star is still on the resume you mean.

On a university account

The definition carries an extra note for organisation members: "This is the resume primarily accessed by your school's administrator. This is how you would tell your school that this is the resume you want to be represented by."

Your careers adviser opens your primary resume in their portal and can download it as PDF or DOCX. Pick one you would be content to have read by an adviser, or by an employer they introduce you to, and move the star when you build something better.