Popular résumé
The four layouts most people pick, in the order a machine would rank them — which is close to the reverse of the order a template gallery displays them in.
What this layout usually means
- Reverse-chronological single column — the default, and the one to use
- Modern with a sidebar — looks current, loses the sidebar
- Functional or skills-first — hides dates, which reads as hiding something
- Creative multi-column — unreadable to a machine, whatever it looks like to a person
What happens when a machine reads it
Not an opinion about design. These are the things a text extractor does with a page, and you can watch ours do them to your own file at the bottom of this page.
- Functional layouts
- Grouping by skill instead of by job removes the dated employment history a parser is built to extract. It also signals a gap to every recruiter who has seen one before, which is all of them.
- Two pages
- Not a parsing problem. The common failure is a second page whose header repeats — extraction keeps the repetition, and the document reads as if it restarts.
- PDF versus Word
- A PDF exported from a word processor is fine and usually better. A PDF exported from a design tool is often a picture of a résumé, which arrives containing no text whatsoever.
Reads cleanly
Reverse-chronological, one column, exported from a word processor or printed from a browser. Everything else is a trade against the reader you have to get past first.
Write one instead
Our builder writes the structure above, exports as PDF, Word or plain text, and shows you what a parser reads back as you type. Free, no account, and the download is not the paywall.
Open the free builderOr check the one you have
Drop it here and see the text a screening system gets — which sections it finds, which it loses, and what it decides you do for a living. Read in this tab; nothing is uploaded.
Your file is read by code running in this tab. It is never sent anywhere, and we never see it. Open your browser’s network tab and drop it again — you will see no upload.