Simple resume format

The simple resume format, section by section

1. Name and contact details at the top: email, phone number, city, and a LinkedIn link if you have one.
2. Summary: two or three lines on who you are as a professional and what you are good at. Freshers can write a short career objective instead.
3. Experience, latest job first. For each job: your title, the company, the city and the dates, then two to five bullets on what you achieved.
4. Education: degree, school and year. Put it above Experience if you have just graduated.
5. Skills: the ones the job ad asks for, in its words.
6. Optional: certifications, projects, languages, volunteer work, when they help for this job.

That order is the reverse-chronological format, the one recruiters expect and hiring software reads most reliably. A simple format keeps it on a single column, with one font, clear headings and no tables, icons or skill bars. The Simple templates above all follow it: one column, text and thin rules.

A simple resume sample

Here is the format filled in for a made-up applicant. The name, employers and figures are illustrative, to show what each section looks like when it is written well.

How to write a simple resume, step by step

1. Start from the job ad. Underline the skills and duties it mentions; those are the words your resume needs.
2. Write your experience first, even though it sits in the middle. For each job, list what you did that matches the ad, and add a number where you have one: calls a day, customers served, sales made, people trained.
3. Write the summary last, from the strongest two or three points in your experience.
4. Add education and skills. Keep the skills list to what this job uses.
5. Keep it short. Remove old or unrelated jobs before you shrink the font. US careers advice puts a resume at usually no more than one page (UNC Writing Center); Canada's Job Bank and US federal hiring set two pages as the most.
6. Check it with the free ATS resume checker to see what software reads from it, and read it once aloud for mistakes.

Simple resume format for freshers

With no full-time job yet, move Education to the top and add a Projects or Internships section in place of Experience. College projects, internships, part-time work and organisations you led all count; write them as bullets with results, exactly as you would a job. Country specifics are on our fresh graduate resume format (Philippines) and fresher resume format (India) pages.

Simple resume format in PDF or Word

Every template on this page downloads as either. Send the PDF unless the employer asks otherwise: it looks the same on every screen and printer. Choose Word when a recruiter or portal asks for a .docx, or when you want to keep editing the file in Word or Google Docs; it keeps the same simple layout, with real headings and bullets.

Looking for a blank resume format? Choose a template and pick Start fresh: you get the empty format with every heading in place, ready to fill in. Building and checking is free; you pay only to download.

What to leave out of a simple resume

• Tables, text boxes and columns: software can read them out of order.
• Icons and skill bars: a bar showing 80% English tells a recruiter nothing.
• More than one font, or colours on body text.
• A photo, unless the country or job expects one; our country pages say where it is usual.

Why layout matters to hiring software, and what we found when we tested our own templates: how we test our templates.

For what changes from one country to the next (photos, personal details, length), see resume formats by country.

Sources

Checked on 4 October 2026.

• UNC Writing Center: Curricula Vitae (CVs) versus resumes
• Job Bank, Government of Canada: How to write a good resume
• US Office of Personnel Management: agency guidance on the two-page limit on resume length
• CVEmber: How we test our templates with resume parsers
• CVEmber: Resume format for the Philippines