Free Resume Template — 4 Layouts

What to include in every section

A resume is a curated argument that you are the right person for one specific role. Every section should add evidence toward that argument. Here is what belongs in each part of a professional resume:

Header

Your name in a large, legible font. Below it: city and state (not your full street address — that is outdated and wastes space), phone number, professional email address, and your LinkedIn URL shortened to linkedin.com/in/yourhandle. If you have a portfolio or GitHub relevant to the role, add it here. Nothing else.

Professional summary

Two to three sentences at the top that tell a recruiter who you are, what you are good at, and what you are looking for. Write it last, after you have filled in everything else. The summary is a distillation — you cannot summarize what you have not written yet. Avoid objectives ("I am looking for a role where I can grow") and replace them with value statements ("Marketing manager with seven years of B2B SaaS experience. Scaled pipeline from $2M to $11M ARR across two companies.").

Work experience

List positions in reverse chronological order. For each role include: company name, your job title, location (City, State or Remote), and employment dates (Month Year to Month Year or Present). Under each role write three to five achievement bullets. See the next section for how to write those.

Education

Degree, major, institution, and graduation year. Include GPA only if it is 3.5 or above and you graduated within the last three years. List relevant coursework, honors, or thesis only if they are genuinely relevant to the role. If you have more than five years of professional experience, education moves below work experience.

Skills

A brief, scannable section with two to three rows: technical skills (programming languages, tools, certifications), platforms or software, and soft skills. Do not list every technology you have ever touched. Prioritize skills that appear in the job description.

Optional sections

Certifications, publications, volunteer work, languages, or projects can add real signal when they are relevant to the role. Each optional section should earn its place — if a hiring manager would not care, cut it.

How to write achievement bullets that stand out

Most resume bullets describe duties. The best bullets describe results. The difference is the gap between "Managed social media accounts" and "Grew Instagram following from 4,200 to 31,000 in 12 months by launching a weekly video series." The second sentence tells a story with a clear before, action, and after.

Use the CAR formula: Context, Action, Result.

• Context: What was the situation or challenge? (Keep this brief — one phrase, not a sentence.)
• Action: What did you specifically do? Use a strong past-tense action verb.
• Result: What happened because of your action? Quantify wherever possible.

Strong action verbs by function:

• Leadership: Directed, spearheaded, championed, mentored, mobilized, restructured
• Sales and growth: Grew, expanded, secured, generated, closed, converted
• Operations: Streamlined, automated, reduced, optimized, implemented, overhauled
• Analysis: Identified, forecasted, evaluated, synthesized, modeled, diagnosed
• Communication: Authored, presented, negotiated, trained, facilitated, launched

Numbers do not have to be percentages. Dollar amounts, headcount, time saved, rank in a class, scale of a project, or customer count all work. If you truly have no numbers, be specific about scope: "Maintained documentation for a 14-person engineering team" beats "Maintained documentation."

Making your resume ATS-friendly

Applicant tracking systems are used by the majority of companies with more than 50 employees. The system parses your resume before a human ever sees it and scores it against the job description. A resume that a human finds beautiful can score poorly in an ATS if it uses the wrong formatting. Here is how to pass the machine and impress the person.

• Use standard section headings. ATS software recognizes Work Experience, Education, and Skills. Creative section names like "Where I Have Made an Impact" will often be misclassified or ignored entirely.
• Avoid tables, text boxes, and columns. Most ATS parsers read left to right across the entire page, so two-column layouts create scrambled text in the parsed output. This template uses a single-column structure to avoid that problem.
• Mirror the job description. ATS matching is often literal. If the posting says "project management experience" and your resume says "program coordination," the system may not count it. Use the exact phrases from the description where they honestly apply.
• Spell out acronyms at least once. Write "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" on first use, because some ATS systems do not link the acronym to the spelled-out version.
• Submit as PDF. PDF preserves your formatting reliably across operating systems. Some very old ATS platforms prefer .docx — if you are unsure, check the job posting or submit both.
• Use a simple, standard file name. FirstName-LastName-Resume-2026.pdf is better than Resume-Final-v3-ACTUAL.pdf.

Format choices: one page vs. two, chronological vs. functional

Two questions come up constantly about resume format. Here is the practical answer to each.

One page or two?

One page is the right default for most people. If you have under ten years of experience, everything relevant to the role should fit on a single page. Cut aggressively: older jobs get fewer bullets, irrelevant experience gets removed entirely, and the summary gets trimmed to two or three tight sentences.

Two pages are appropriate if you have ten or more years of directly relevant experience and you cannot reasonably condense it without losing important signal. The rule is that both pages should be full — never a two-page resume with a half-empty second page. Start page two with a role or section, not continuation of a bullet list from page one.

Chronological vs. functional?

Chronological (reverse-chronological, most recent first) is strongly preferred by recruiters and is what this template uses. It is also the format that ATS systems handle best.

Functional resumes group experience by skill category rather than by employer. Career coaches sometimes recommend them for career changers or people with employment gaps. In practice, most hiring managers distrust functional resumes because they obscure when and where you developed your skills. If you are changing careers, a hybrid format — chronological structure with a strong skills section and a targeted summary — is a better choice than a pure functional resume.

Common resume mistakes and how to avoid them

• Listing responsibilities instead of achievements. Describe what you accomplished, not what your job required you to do. Every role has responsibilities; achievements belong to you.
• Using the same resume for every application. A resume tailored to a specific role consistently outperforms a generic one. Spend five minutes swapping in keywords and reordering bullets to match each posting.
• Including an objective statement. Objectives tell the employer what you want, not what you offer. Replace it with a professional summary focused on the value you bring.
• Using a personal email address that looks unprofessional. firstname.lastname@gmail.com is fine. skaterdude99@hotmail.com is not.
• Putting references available upon request at the bottom. This line is universally understood and wastes space. Remove it.
• Font and size choices that hurt readability. Anything below 10 point is a reading strain. Decorative fonts are a visual red flag. Calibri, Arial, or Georgia at 10.5 to 11 point is the safe choice.
• Not proofreading. A typo in the first 10 lines is enough for some recruiters to stop reading. Read the resume aloud, then ask someone else to read it.

How to use this template

From open to finished resume takes about 30 minutes if you have your information ready.

1. Open the template. Click Open in Google Docs above. The file opens in view-only mode in your browser.
2. Make a copy. Go to File then Make a copy. Name it YourName-Resume-2026 and save it to your Drive. You now own an editable copy.
3. Fill in the header. Replace the placeholder name, contact details, and LinkedIn URL with your own.
4. Write your professional summary last. Leave it until you have completed the rest of the resume, then write two to three tight sentences summarizing the role you are targeting and your strongest qualification.
5. Add your work experience. Most recent role first. Write three to five achievement bullets per role using the CAR formula. Include dates in Month Year format.
6. Add education and skills. Highest degree first. Keep the skills section focused on what is relevant to the jobs you are applying for.
7. Trim to one page. If your content overflows, cut older bullet points, reduce font size to 10.5, or tighten margin spacing slightly. Do not cram text.
8. Export to PDF. Go to File then Download then PDF document. This is the format to attach to applications.

Alternatively, download the .docx file from this page to edit directly in Microsoft Word or another word processor.