What makes a resume template ATS-friendly
An applicant tracking system reads your file and fills in a form from it. A template helps or hurts at that step in a handful of specific ways:
- One column. Software reads a page from top to bottom. Two columns can be read across, line by line, mixing your skills into your job history.
- Real text. Every word must be selectable text, not part of an image. Text inside a picture is invisible to software.
- Your name first, whole. The first line of the file should be your name in one style. A name split into two colours or letter-spaced capitals has been read as two words, or as part of the next line.
- Dates beside each job. A job's title, company and dates belong together. Dates printed at the end of a job, after its bullets, are often missed.
- Headings software recognises: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills. A clever title like “Where I've been” may not be recognised as your work history.
- Bullets as text characters, embedded fonts and body text of at least 9 points, so nothing is lost or substituted when the file is read.
Every template on this page is built that way, and these checks run on each one's PDF before any change to it goes live.
What is an ATS friendly resume, and how to make an ATS friendly resume
An ATS friendly resume is one that applicant tracking software can read in the right order: your name and contact details first, then clearly named sections, in text that can be selected, with dates in one format. An ATS resume template is simply a layout built that way. To make an ATS friendly resume, start from a single-column layout, use the standard headings (Summary, Work experience, Education, Skills), keep contact details as plain text rather than icons, and export a PDF that has real text in it.
For freshers, an ATS friendly resume puts education and projects near the top, then internships, skills and certifications, all in the same plain layout. The ATS format resume and the ATS CV format are the same thing: a CV and a resume are read the same way, so the same single-column rules apply to both. Any template on this page is free to fill in, so you can try an ATS friendly resume template free before you decide, and pay only when you download the file; check it afterwards with the ATS resume checker.
What does ATS mean?
ATS stands for applicant tracking system: the software many employers use to collect applications and search them. When you apply, its parser pulls your name, contact details, each job with its title, company and dates, your education and your skills into a database. A recruiter then searches that database. If a field was read wrongly, or not at all, your resume can be missed even when you are a good fit. That is why the layout matters as much as the words.
How these templates are tested
We test the files themselves, made the same way your download is, with sample people in the US and India. On one-column templates, across the parsers' latest reads, the name and email were right on every file, and 94% to 97% of jobs were read whole: title, company and dates in one entry. Where a parser misread a layout, we changed the layout. The full method, the results and what we have not tested are on how we test our templates (updated 29 Sep 2026).
To see what software reads from your own resume, made with any tool, run it through the free ATS resume checker. It works on your device, with no account.
Why our two-column designs say “For email”
We also make 10 two-column templates, on the templates page. Commercial parsers read them well in our tests, but our own stricter checker does not always read the name and city from them, so each is labelled “For email”: use it when a person will open the file, and use one of the designs above for online application forms. The label comes from each template's layout, not from a list we type, so it can't be wrong.
PDF or Word?
Every template downloads as either. A PDF looks the same on every screen, and it is what our parser tests use. The Word file keeps the same one-column structure, with real headings (“Heading 1”), real bullets and nothing in the page header or footer, so it can be edited in Word or Google Docs. We have not yet run the Word files through commercial parsers, so when a portal accepts both, send the PDF. If an employer asks for Word, send the Word file.
An ATS-friendly CV
In the UK and much of the world, the same document is called a CV (see CV vs resume). The rules above are the same; every template here works as a CV. For what a UK CV should and shouldn't include, see the UK CV format.
For a more designed look, see creative resume templates, and for whether to add a picture, resume with photo.
Sources
Checked on 4 October 2026.