Teal Review

I ran Teal on three anonymised CVs last month, a software engineer, a retail manager pivoting to operations, and a recent graduate. Same tool, three different jobs-to-be-done, and the results told me exactly where Teal earns its money and where it doesn’t.

Candidates have been forwarding me Teal-built CVs for about eighteen months now. I recognise them within about ten seconds on a first read. That’s not a criticism, it’s just pattern recognition after twelve years of screening resumes. What I wanted to find out with this test was whether Teal’s output, after a proper edit, actually performs better than a candidate sitting with ChatGPT for twenty minutes and doing the same work themselves.

This review is the answer.

What Teal actually is

Strip away the marketing and Teal does four things:

A Chrome extension that saves jobs. You’re on LinkedIn, Indeed, AngelList, a company careers page, click the extension, the job is saved into Teal with title, company, description, and the original URL. This is the genuinely novel bit. Most job seekers are managing applications in a spreadsheet they abandon by week three.

A kanban tracker for applications. Saved jobs flow through columns: bookmarked, applying, applied, interviewing, offer, rejected. You move cards manually. It’s simple, and simple is what active job seekers actually need.

An AI resume builder. You feed it your existing CV (or build from scratch), paste a job description, and it suggests which bullets to emphasise, rewrites weaker ones, and generates new bullets aligned to the posting’s keywords. The key word is suggests, you approve each change.

A Match Score. Teal scores your CV against each saved job on a 0–100 scale based on keyword overlap, experience alignment, and a handful of other factors. The score is directional, not predictive. A 75 doesn’t mean you’ll get an interview; it means the obvious keyword gaps are closed.

That’s the whole product. Everything else, the cover letter tool, the LinkedIn profile reviewer, the contacts tracker, is peripheral and not where Teal’s value sits.

Who Teal is genuinely for

After running three test CVs through the full workflow, I’d put Teal in front of four specific candidate profiles:

The active job seeker applying to 10+ roles a week. This is Teal’s core user. If you’re between jobs, out on the open market, and firing off applications every day, the combination of the tracker and the per-job tailoring saves you real time. I timed myself tailoring Candidate A’s CV (the software engineer) for three different senior IC roles, eight minutes per CV in Teal versus twenty-two minutes with ChatGPT and manual formatting. Over fifty applications, that’s ten hours back.

The mid-career candidate who won’t send a generic CV. If you’re five-to-fifteen years in and you know one-size-fits-all doesn’t work at your level, Teal’s tailoring workflow matches how you already think about applications. You’re not starting from scratch, you’re adjusting emphasis.

The career changer mapping transferable skills. Candidate B (retail-to-operations pivot) is the case study here. Her original bullets were full of retail vocabulary, “store shrinkage”, “visual merchandising compliance”, that recruiters screening for operations roles were skimming past. Teal’s AI flagged the mismatch and suggested translations: “inventory loss reduction”, “in-store compliance audits”. Not perfect (I still had to edit) but it surfaced the gap faster than she could have alone.

The organised job seeker who wants the tracker more than the AI. Plenty of candidates I talk to just want one place to manage their pipeline. Teal’s free tier handles that without forcing you into the AI features at all.

Who Teal is NOT for

Equally important, three profiles where Teal underdelivers and you shouldn’t bother:

The low-volume applicant. If you’re applying to two or three carefully chosen roles a month, the overhead of learning Teal costs you more than it saves. Open ChatGPT, paste your CV, paste the job description, ask for a tailored version, edit for twenty minutes. You’ll get the same outcome without paying $9/month.

The candidate who just wants a pretty template. Teal’s templates are deliberately plain, ATS-safe, clean, undramatic. If you’re in design, marketing, or any role where visual polish is part of the judgement, Teal isn’t the right tool. Use Canva or Figma for the design; use Teal (or not) for the content.

Freelancers and contractors. If you’re pitching project work rather than applying to full-time roles, a CV isn’t your main sales tool. You need case studies, a portfolio, and a proposal workflow. Teal solves none of that.

The real output test

I tested Teal on three anonymised CVs. Here’s what the AI actually produced, and what I did with it.

Candidate A: Software engineer, 4 years experience

Original bullet: “Worked on the frontend team to improve site performance using React.”

Teal’s suggested rewrite for a senior IC role: “Led React 18 migration across 12 microservices, reducing hydration errors 73% and cutting page load time by 1.8 seconds.”

That’s a strong output. The structure is right, verb, specific tech, measurable impact. I still edited it. I cut “Led” because the candidate was an IC not a team lead, and I verified the numbers with him before we used them. But the skeleton Teal produced saved me time.

Candidate B: Retail manager → operations pivot

Original bullet: “Managed a team of 12 retail associates across three store locations.”

Teal’s suggested rewrite for an ops role: “Directed a 12-person distributed workforce across three sites, implementing standardised operational procedures that improved cross-location consistency.”

This one’s weaker. “Distributed workforce” is technically correct but feels like an AI reach, three retail stores in one city isn’t what most ops hiring managers picture when they read “distributed”. I rewrote it as: “Ran operations across three retail sites with a 12-person team; standardised opening, inventory, and closing procedures across all three.” Closer to how she actually talks about the work.

This is the pattern. Teal gets you 70% of the way. The last 30% is you.

Candidate C: Recent graduate, 1 year of internships

Original bullet: “Interned at a marketing agency helping with campaigns.”

Teal’s suggested rewrite: “Supported cross-functional campaign execution for enterprise clients, contributing to a 15% quarter-over-quarter engagement lift.”

This is where Teal lost to ChatGPT. The output is full of banned vocabulary, a vague percentage with no source, and an inflated verb for an internship. When I ran the same original bullet through ChatGPT with a prompt telling it to avoid buzzwords and ask for specifics, I got a follow-up question: “What specific task did you do on these campaigns?” The candidate answered, and we wrote a better bullet together.

Teal’s AI doesn’t push back. It fills in. That’s a real limitation for junior candidates who don’t yet know what to say, they need interrogation, not fluency.

Pricing, what’s free, what’s paid, what’s a trap

Free tier: Full Chrome extension, unlimited job tracking, basic CV builder, and a limited number of AI tailoring generations per month (Teal has moved this cap a few times; it’s currently enough for five-to-ten tailored CVs). The tracker alone is worth installing the free tier for.

Teal+: Around $9/month on annual billing, roughly $29/month if you pay monthly. Unlocks unlimited AI resume tailoring, unlimited Match Score analysis, and the full template library.

Hidden gotcha: The annual price is advertised per-month but billed as a single annual charge. If you’re in active search mode for two or three months, that might not be your best option, go monthly, cancel when you land the role.

When Teal+ pays for itself: My rough rule from watching candidates use it, if you’re sending 10+ tailored applications a week, the time saved covers the subscription inside the first week. If you’re sending 2–3 a week, it doesn’t.

How Teal compares

Teal vs Rezi. Rezi is a narrower product focused on ATS keyword matching. If your problem is specifically that you’re getting filtered out by ATS at known companies, Rezi’s keyword-gap tooling is sharper. If your problem is the broader workflow of applying to lots of roles, Teal wins. I covered the full head-to-head in Teal vs Rezi.

Teal vs ChatGPT alone. ChatGPT (free or Plus) can produce equivalent bullet rewrites if you prompt it well. Teal’s advantage isn’t the AI quality; it’s the integrated workflow. You don’t copy-paste job descriptions. You don’t lose track of which CV you sent where. You don’t forget to follow up. The $9/month is for the workflow, not the intelligence. If you’re disciplined with ChatGPT and a spreadsheet, you can skip Teal.

Teal vs Resume Worded. Resume Worded is more of a scorer than a builder. It’ll tell you your CV’s weaknesses, but you do the rewriting elsewhere. Teal builds, Resume Worded grades. If you want both in one place, Teal covers more ground.

My verdict

If you’re applying to 10+ roles a week and you’re willing to edit the AI output properly, Teal+ is worth $9/month; for everyone else, the free tier’s job tracker is the only bit of Teal you actually need.

FAQs

Is Teal genuinely free? Yes, the free tier includes the Chrome extension, the job tracker, and a limited number of AI resume tailorings per month. You can run the tracker indefinitely without paying. The AI features are where the paywall lives.

Does Teal’s CV pass ATS systems? In my testing, yes. I submitted Teal-generated CVs through two ATS platforms (Workday and a Greenhouse-equivalent) and all three test CVs parsed cleanly. Teal’s templates are deliberately plain to preserve ATS compatibility, no columns, no images, no fancy fonts. That’s the right call even if the templates look dull.

How do I cancel Teal+? Cancellation is inside account settings. It’s one click and takes effect at the end of your current billing cycle. Annual subscribers get access until the full year ends. No hidden retention flow, which I appreciated when I tested the cancel path.

Does Teal have a mobile app? There’s a mobile app but it lags behind the desktop experience. The Chrome extension doesn’t exist on mobile (obviously), and the AI tailoring is clunky on a phone. Teal is a desktop tool. Use the mobile app for checking status on your tracked applications, not for writing.

Can I export my data from Teal? You can export your CV as PDF or DOCX. You can export your tracked jobs as a CSV. You cannot export the AI-generated bullets as a standalone library, they live attached to whatever CV version you used them in. Not a deal-breaker, but worth knowing if you’re the kind of person who wants a portable archive.

How does Teal handle my data? Teal stores your CV content, tracked jobs, and any drafts on their servers. They state they don’t sell data to third parties. If you’re privacy-sensitive, the realistic option is to use the free tier for tracking only and do your CV writing offline.

Related reading

• Teal vs Rezi: which AI resume builder is worth it — the full head-to-head on both tools.
• Best AI resume builders 2026 — where Teal ranks against seven other tools I tested.
• ChatGPT prompts for resume writing — the prompt library that competes with Teal’s AI features.
• How to tailor your resume to a job description with AI — the workflow Teal automates, done manually.

Should you try Teal?

Install the free Chrome extension today. Track your next ten applications through the kanban board. If after two weeks you’re using the tracker daily and you’ve hit the AI tailoring limit, upgrade to Teal+. If you haven’t, don’t, the free tier is doing the job you actually needed.