Resume Templates

How to choose a resume template

Template choice matters less than most people expect and more than the people who ignore it entirely assume. A layout cannot make weak content strong. What it can do is make strong content easy to find in the seven or eight seconds a recruiter spends on a first pass — or, if you choose badly, hide it.

Two questions settle it. First: how are you submitting this? If you are uploading through a company's careers portal, your file is parsed by software before a person sees it, and a conservative single-column layout removes all risk. If you are emailing a named person or attaching to a portfolio, you have more freedom. Second: how much history do you have? A layout with a generous sidebar looks elegant with three roles and cramped with nine.

Match the template to the field

Conservative fields — law, accounting, banking, academia, most public sector roles — reward restraint. A heavily designed resume in those contexts reads as a misjudgement of the audience rather than as creativity. Design-led fields are the exception, and even there the resume is usually not where your design skill should be demonstrated; your portfolio is.

What every template here has in common

Whichever you pick, the structural decisions that affect screening are already made for you:

A few mistakes worth avoiding

• Choosing on looks alone. The prettiest thumbnail is not the best fit for nine roles and a two-page history.
• Shrinking type to force one page. Below 10pt you are asking a tired reader to squint. Cut content instead — start with duty-style bullets.
• Adding a photograph for applications in India, the US, the UK, Canada or Australia, where many employers strip them to limit bias exposure.
• Filling every inch. White space is what makes the page scannable. A dense page signals someone who could not prioritise.
• Using one template for everything. Keep a master resume and produce targeted copies; a saved account makes that a copy-and-edit rather than a rebuild.