Project X #20 ~ Build an AI-Powered CV Reviewer in Python — Step-by-Step Project

Learn how to build an AI-powered résumé reviewer with Python and OpenAI — extract text from PDFs, summarize key skills, and automate CV analysis in minutes.

Most people think an AI-powered resume reviewer sounds like something only big companies or expensive SaaS tools could pull off. But that’s the furthest from the truth.

Under it all, it’s actually a simple, developer-friendly idea you can build in a single afternoon. That is the whole point of this project.

All it really does is read a PDF, extract the text, break it into smaller chunks, send each one to a language model with clear instructions, and then stitch the results back together into something a human can understand. That’s it.

In this project, we’ll build that exact system from scratch and see why it’s such a great learning project.

Along the way, you’ll learn how prompt design shapes the model’s behavior and how one small change can turn a generic summarizer into a resume-specific reviewer.

Welcome to Project X – where dreams meet code! Dive into creativity as I guide you through the creation of a captivating project, step by step, in each monthly edition. From conceptualization to execution. Join premium today!

By the end of this project, you’ll have a Python script that you can upload your own CV to and get a broken down response that takes everything and summarises it in real-time.

Along the way, you’ll learn not just how to build out an awesome project but I also hope to show you guys my thought process. You’ll get to work with instrumental libraries such as PyPDF2, OpenAI, pathlib, and many more!

And don’t worry if this is your first time using OpenAI in code. I’ll walk you through every step so you can follow along without feeling lost.

Before we start, make sure you have these packages installed:

pip3 install pypdf2 openai

Side note, you will need to get your own OpenAI API which you can get on their site for this project to work. But it’s worth it because you can start building more with AI once you have one.

I’ll link the previous Project X, Build a Beginner-Friendly Reddit Web Scraper with BeautifulSoup for future reference.

👉 Premium readers can access the Video and Source Code.

👉 Gain access to my full article archive.

👉 Recommend projects at the bottom.

These projects take a lot of time and resources for me to craft in a way that I can present them and share them for you all.

Thank you for allowing me to do work that I find meaningful. This is my full-time job so I hope you will support me!

👉 If you value projects like this one, please leave it a ❤️ and share it with others. This helps more people discover these projects, which helps me out!

I’ve linked the Git repo and a full video to this project as always at the bottom. So if you’re ready to create something interactive, useful, and fun, let’s dive in—we’re just getting started!

P.S - Will you learn Python? Join my Python Masterclass Here.