Resume templates for every role

Work backwards from the application rather than from the design. Your job title and career stage decide what belongs near the top: a student resume leads with projects and coursework, a senior one leads with scope and outcomes, and a career-change resume leads with the through-line between the two. Get that right and the rest is presentation.

Layout comes next. Single column is the safer default and the easier one for a parser to read in order; two column earns its place when a skills or certifications block deserves standing of its own. Style and accent colour come last, and they matter least. No recruiter has ever rejected a resume over its shade of navy, but plenty of parsers have rejected one over a table.

The gallery below filters on exactly those axes: 172 job titles across 22 industries, seven career stages from student to executive, five layout formats and eight visual styles. Every base design is checked by a parser before it appears here, so choosing on looks does not cost you a parse.

Four things, and none of them are visible. The text has to be real text rather than an image or an outlined font, because a parser that cannot select a word cannot index it. The section headings have to use the names the software already knows: Experience, Education, Skills. Nothing load-bearing can sit in a page header, a footer or a text box, because plenty of upload paths strip those before anything reads the file. And the dates have to follow one format down the page so a parser can build a timeline out of them.

What is not on that list is just as useful. Colour is fine. Rules, hairlines and generous white space are fine. A second column is fine if the reading order stays obvious. The distinction that matters is between decoration a parser can ignore and structure a parser has to follow, and every template here keeps the two apart.

A template gives you the empty structure of a resume. An example shows you a finished one. If you already know what you want to say, start here. If you are not yet sure what a strong resume for your role looks like, read two or three resume examples first, notice what they lead with and how long their bullets run, then come back and open the matching template.

Most applications want a letter as well. The cover letter templates are built from the same design system, so a pair chosen from both galleries shares its typeface, spacing and heading treatment and arrives looking like one application rather than two documents. Cover letter examples are worth a look for the same reason the resume ones are.