Given the short amount of time most recruiters spend reading resumes before choosing which applicants to interview — just six seconds on average — picking a layout highlighting your strengths is essential to moving onto the next stage of the hiring process.
What’s the key to creating a resume that showcases your best qualities? Choosing the right resume template.
Find the Perfect Resume Template
Choosing the right resume template is step one in writing a great resume. Your layout largely dictates how you present your skills and experience and highlight your accomplishments. Similarly, your template choice should consider your industry, experience level, and career path progression.
Below, learn more about some of the most popular resume templates we offer. Use them for inspiration, or connect with our resume builder to plug in your information for step-by-step guidance on creating your perfect resume.
Professional resume template
Our professional resume template is one of our most popular basic resume templates for good reason. This template offers users a clean, classic look that focuses on your goals, skills, and achievements with minimal design elements.
With clearly outlined sections for your professional summary, skills, experience, and education, hiring managers will be able to see at a glance that you are the right person for the job.
When you have a stellar work history, our chronological resume template helps you shout it from the treetops. Linear and easy to scan, this one is ideal for professionals with a clear career trajectory and no significant changes.
The chronological resume template is the preferred format for recruiters and hiring managers. It suits any professional seeking employment in their current line of work.
The functional resume format can help job seekers with employment gaps or limited experience direct the hiring manager’s attention to their skills and qualifications.
This template places the skills section at the top of the resume to emphasize the job seeker’s competencies, before diving into their work experience.
Simple resume templates like this one are appropriate across various industries and job titles. The sleek design relies on bold headers to organize your summary, skills, work history, and education into easy-to-digest sections that will catch the eye of recruiters and hiring managers.
For job seekers looking to nab a senior role with a thriving company, presentation is king when it comes to their resumes. Our executive resume template can help you highlight your professional accomplishments and managerial successes in a clean, conservative format suited for a variety of industries.
Our management resume template is a twist on a classic resume design. It utilizes interesting section dividers and cool gray to punctuate your accomplishments. It’s a favorite design of sales, retail, and health care professionals, but it will work equally well for creative and conservative industries.
Of all our good resume templates, this template is perfect for the job seeker who doesn’t want to blend in with the crowd of standard black-and-white resumes. With its bold purple header, your contact information pops up, making it easy for employers to remember your name and call you in for that job interview.
Modern times call for modern resume templates, and ours won’t disappoint. A fresh take on a classic format, this template combines a clean, concise style with understated sophistication.
The modern resume template is highly recommended by professionals in various industries, including healthcare, education, and sales. This format is also perfect for executives across industries.
Infographic resume templates are layouts that, like a good data visualization or infographic, use visuals to bring your critical career information to life in a way that’s fast and easy to digest. From a cognitive perspective, these kinds of resume templates are supposed to make it easier for the 50 percent of our brain dedicated to visual function to process key points more efficiently.
So why wouldn’t you wow a recruiter or hiring leader with a slick and savvy illustration that not only uses text to tout your accomplishments, but it also drives home your creativity with a matching image?
Well, for one, many companies rely on an applicant tracking system (ATS) to initially scan resumes and weed out unqualified candidates. This software relies primarily on keyword matching and has a relatively difficult time understanding even the most basic visuals, like tables. Accordingly, including something as complex as an infographic resume may mean your application never makes it past the machines into human hands.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use an infographic resume, it just means you should be mindful of when to send such a document.
When to Send an Infographic Resume Template
You’ve made it past an ATS and have already been contacted by a recruiter or hiring leader for an official screen. Now you can pass on the more engaging version of your resume to the humans who’ll evaluate you in future.
You’ve been referred directly to a hiring leader or contact within a company.
You’re not sending your resume digitally. In this case, make sure you have a high-quality version of your printed application.