Resume Templates: How to Choose One

A template is a set of decisions somebody else made about your document. Most of them are harmless. A few change whether your text can be read at all, and those are worth being able to spot.

The two-minute test

Before anything else, here is how to evaluate any template you are considering.

Fill it with a paragraph of real content. Export it to PDF. Open the PDF, select all the text, and paste it into a plain text editor.

Then read what you get. Three failure modes appear immediately.

• Scrambled order. Your sidebar skills appear in the middle of your job history, or your name is halfway down. Multi-column layouts often read in an unexpected order.
• Missing content. Text you can see in the PDF is absent from the paste. That content lives in something that does not export as text.
• Nothing at all. The whole document is an image. It will parse as blank.

A template that survives this test is safe to use. One that does not will cost you applications in ways you never get feedback about.

The five properties that matter

One: a single column for content. This is the big one. A two-column layout with a coloured sidebar looks organised to a human and can be read out of order by a machine. If you want visual separation, get it from spacing and typographic weight rather than from columns.

Two: content not held in containers. Text boxes, tables and shapes render beautifully and are unreliable when extracted. A table used purely for invisible alignment is the most common hidden offender, because nothing about the appearance reveals it.

Three: nothing important in headers or footers. Some parsers skip them. Which means a template putting your phone number and email in the header may produce a document with no contact details at all as far as the system is concerned.

Four: standard section headings. Experience, Education, Skills. Not “My Journey” or “What I Bring”. Both human readers and automated ones look for the conventional words, and creativity here has no upside.

Five: a common font at a readable size. An unusual font may substitute unpredictably on another machine, changing your line breaks and your page count. Contrast matters too: light grey text on white fails the contrast ratios in the WCAG standards, which is a reasonable benchmark for whether a tired person can read your document at all.

Format families

Three broad shapes, and the choice is about your history rather than your taste.

Reverse chronological. Roles newest first. The default, expected by nearly everyone, and the right choice unless you have a specific reason otherwise. See the reverse chronological guide.

Functional or skills-based. Organised by capability rather than by employer. Occasionally useful for a career change, and treated with suspicion because it can obscure dates. See the functional resume guide.

Hybrid. A skills summary at the top, then reverse chronological history. The usual compromise for career changers and the one most likely to be read normally.

The full comparison is in the resume format guide.

Where creativity is actually appropriate

The blanket advice to avoid design is wrong for a minority of roles.

If you are a graphic designer, an illustrator or an art director, the document is a work sample and a plain template undersells you. The way to have both: a designed PDF for direct human submission and a plain version for application systems. Two files, same content, used in different channels. See the creative resume guide.

For everyone else, including engineers, marketers and people who simply have good taste, design carries risk and no measurable reward.

Length is a template decision

Templates quietly determine your page count through margins, line spacing and font size, which is why people find themselves at one and a half pages with no idea how.

Decide the length first, then pick a template that reaches it honestly. One page for early career and most applications up to about ten years. Two pages when you have the content to fill them. See the one-page resume guide and the two-page guide.

Never shrink the font below readability or drop margins below about half an inch to force a page break. A cramped one-pager reads worse than a comfortable two-pager.

Export properly

The template is only half of it. The export is where documents lose their text layer.

Use the application’s own PDF export rather than printing to an image. Microsoft documents saving or converting to PDF from the desktop apps, and the equivalent exists everywhere else.

A flattened or scanned file has no selectable text, so a parser reads nothing and a screen reader reads nothing, which is the point Section508.gov makes about accessible PDFs. Send PDF unless the posting explicitly asks for a Word file.

A short checklist

1. Single column for content.
2. No tables or text boxes holding text.
3. Contact details in the body, not the header.
4. Conventional section headings.
5. Common font, readable size, real contrast.
6. Exported as PDF with a selectable text layer.
7. Paste test passed.

Everything else is preference.

Related

For the machine-readable specifics, see ATS resume templates. For each source of templates and its traps, see free Word resume templates, the Google Docs guide and the Microsoft Word guide. For plain choices, see basic resume templates and professional resume templates.

You can browse the ATS-friendly templates or start building free.