Free Resume Templates
Skip the blank page. Use a recruiter-approved, ATS-friendly template and focus on your content — we handle the layout and PDF export.
What a template has to get right
Why most downloadable templates hurt you
Search for résumé templates and you'll find two-column documents with sidebars, skill rating dots, icons for phone and email, and a photo circle. They look impressive in a preview and parse badly in practice, because everything decorative competes with the text a screening system needs to read.
The templates here go the other way. One column, real headings, selectable text, no graphics carrying information. The visual interest comes from typography and spacing, which cost nothing at parsing time.
- Single-column body so reading order is unambiguous
- Standard headings: Profile, Experience, Education, Skills
- Contact details in the body, never in the page header
- Consistent month-year date format throughout
- Skill levels written as words, not dots or bars
Choosing a layout for your situation
Reverse-chronological suits almost everyone with a continuous work history and is what recruiters expect by default. A skills-led arrangement helps career changers and people returning after a break, because it puts capability above the timeline. Graduates need a layout that lifts education and projects above short-term jobs.
Rather than picking a file and fighting it in Word, you fill in your content once here and the spacing, page breaks and hierarchy resolve themselves on export.
Which layout suits which situation
There is no single best résumé template. There are layouts that suit a particular career stage and reader, and layouts that quietly work against you. Use this to pick before you start filling anything in.
| Situation | Layout that works | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Student or first job | One page, education first, projects section | Your strongest evidence is recent study and coursework; putting employment first shows an empty box |
| Three to ten years, staying in the same field | One page, reverse-chronological, achievement bullets | The reader is comparing your trajectory against a benchmark; anything decorative slows that down |
| Senior or leadership | Two pages, short profile, scope line under each role | Scope — budget, headcount, region — is the fact being assessed, and it needs room |
| Changing industry | One page with a relevant-projects block above older roles | Ordering by relevance rather than strictly by date puts the transferable work in the first screen |
| Academic or research | Longer document with publications and teaching sections | The convention in academia is completeness; the one-page rule does not apply there |
| Returning after a break | One page, dates by year, brief factual note on the break | Year-level dates remove noise, and one plain sentence closes the question before it is asked |
Sample: the section order that recruiters expect
Two orders for the same content, depending on where you are in your career.
Experienced professional
- Contact → Profile → Experience → Skills → Education → Languages
Graduate or career changer
- Contact → Profile → Skills → Education & Projects → Experience → Languages
The strongest evidence goes above the fold; the rest follows.
Design rules that survive a parser
A template can look excellent on screen and still arrive at the recruiter as scrambled text. Every rule below exists because parsing software fails on the alternative.
Structure
- Single column for the body — side columns are read out of order or dropped
- Standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Not 'My Journey'
- No text boxes, no tables holding your content, no headers or footers carrying key details
Typography
- One typeface, two weights, sizes between 10 and 12pt for body text
- Margins no tighter than 1.5cm on any side so nothing is clipped on print
- Consistent date format throughout, for example 03/2021 - 08/2024
Colour and graphics
- One accent colour at most, used for headings only
- No skill rating bars — they claim a level without evidence and mean nothing to a parser
- No photo in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada or Australia; still expected in parts of continental Europe
- Export as PDF with selectable text, never as an image or a scan
Pick your details, drop them into the layout above and export the PDF.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I edit the template in Word afterwards?
- The export is a finished PDF. Edits are made here in the form and re-exported, which keeps the spacing and page breaks intact.
- Is a creative template ever a good idea?
- For design and art direction roles applied to directly, yes — usually as a portfolio alongside a plain Résumé. For anything routed through a recruiter or a job board, keep it plain.
- Are the templates free to use commercially?
- They're free for your own job applications, with no watermark and no attribution required.
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