Blank Resume Templates and the Fields to Fill

A blank template answers a different question from a designed one. It is not “how should this look” but “what goes in it”, which is the actual problem for anyone writing a first resume.

The complete blank structure

Everything you might need, in the order it should appear. Fields marked optional can be removed without leaving a hole.

[Full name] [City, State] · [Phone] · [Email] · [LinkedIn or portfolio URL, optional]

SUMMARY (optional) [Three lines: what you are, what you have done, what you are looking for]

EXPERIENCE [Job title] · [Employer] · [City, State] · [Month Year] to [Month Year]

• [What you did and what changed]
• [What you did and what changed]
• [What you did and what changed]

[Job title] · [Employer] · [City, State] · [Month Year] to [Month Year]

• [What you did and what changed]
• [What you did and what changed]

EDUCATION [Qualification] · [Institution] · [City, State] · [Year] [Relevant coursework, honours or GPA, all optional]

SKILLS [Comma-separated list, grouped if long]

CERTIFICATIONS (optional) [Name] · [Issuing body] · [Year]

That is the whole thing. If it looks short, that is correct.

What each field is actually for

Name. Largest text on the page. No nickname in quotation marks, no credentials unless they are the licence you are being hired for.

Location. City and state is enough. A full street address is unnecessary and was only ever a convention from the era of posted letters.

Phone and email. In the body of the document, never only in the header, because some parsers skip headers entirely. Use a plain email address based on your name.

Summary. Optional and worth including once you have a few years of history or are changing direction. Skip it for a first resume, where it tends to say nothing. See resume summary examples.

Job title, employer, location, dates. All four, consistently ordered, on every entry. This block is what gets extracted into fields, so consistency here matters more than anywhere else. Use the contractual job title, and see the job titles guide if yours is obscure.

Bullets. Two to five per role, more for recent positions and fewer for old ones. Each should say what you did and what resulted. See resume achievements.

Education. Below experience once you have work history, above it while you are a student or in your first year out. Graduation year is optional and commonly dropped later in a career.

Skills. Concrete and checkable. Tools, languages, licences, methods. Not “team player”. See the resume skills section guide.

Filling it in with no work experience

The structure does not change. What goes in the experience section does.

Use the same four-part heading, with whatever you have as the “employer”: a course project, a volunteer organisation, a sports team, a family business, a school role. Then write bullets the same way, saying what you did and what came of it.

Team Lead, Capstone Project · Cascadia Community College · Bellingham, WA · Jan 2026 to May 2026

• Coordinated a four-person team to deliver a working inventory app by the end of term
• Presented the result to a panel of three faculty assessors

That is a legitimate experience entry. The mistake people make is leaving the section thin because nothing was paid.

See the student resume guide and the teenager resume guide for fuller treatment, and projects on a resume for how to write them up.

The printable version

Paper applications still exist in retail, hospitality, trades, hospitals and some public sector hiring. If you need one, change three things.

Simplify further. No links, since nobody types a URL from paper. Spell out anything a URL was carrying.

Leave more space. A printed document is often photocopied, sometimes badly, so generous margins and clear separation survive better.

Print single sided on plain white. Both sides of one sheet risks the back being missed entirely when copied.

Export to PDF before printing rather than printing from the editor, using the application’s own PDF export, so the layout is fixed and does not shift on a different printer.

Where to find blank templates worth using

University career services publish the plainest and most reliable ones. Harvard’s career services, for instance, offer downloadable resume templates and a written guide in both bullet-point and paragraph formats, and many other institutions publish equivalents openly.

Two things to do with any downloaded blank: search the file for leftover square brackets before sending, and clear the document properties, which frequently still name whoever built the template.

Checks before sending

1. Search the file for [ and for the word “your”.
2. Confirm every job entry has all four of title, employer, location and dates.
3. Confirm the date format is identical throughout.
4. Confirm your phone and email are in the body, not only the header.
5. Export as PDF and open it to check nothing moved.

Related

For choosing a design, see the resume templates guide and basic resume templates. For getting it onto one page, see the one-page resume template guide. For which sections belong at all, see the resume sections guide.

Browse the student templates or fill one in free.