ATS Friendly Resume Template: Layout, Sections and Example Wording

An ats friendly resume template is the safest starting point for most job applications today, because many employers use applicant tracking system software to store, search, and rank resumes before a person reads them. The software is not clever in the way a recruiter is clever. It looks for readable text, standard section headings, matching keywords, and clear dates and job titles. If your file is built with tables, text boxes, icons, and creative columns, the software may scramble or drop your information — and a strong candidate can be filtered out for a formatting reason that has nothing to do with ability.

This guide gives you the complete method behind an effective template: the exact layout to use, what to put in each section, how to choose and place keywords honestly, example wording you can adapt, and a final checklist to test your resume before you submit it. It builds on the fundamentals in our guide on how to write a resume, but focuses entirely on the technical and practical question of getting through the system and still impressing the human who reads you next.

What an Applicant Tracking System Actually Does

When you submit an application online, your resume is usually parsed — broken down into fields such as name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates, education, and skills. Recruiters then search those fields for the requirements of the role: a job title, a skill, a certification, a number of years of experience, or a location. Some systems also score or rank matches to help recruiters sort large volumes.

Two consequences follow. First, readability by software comes before design. A simple, standard structure parses reliably on almost every system. Second, keywords matter, but only honest ones. The system searches for terms from the job description, and the recruiter who reads your resume afterwards will check that your claimed skills are backed by real experience. Stuffing in words you cannot support helps no one, and it damages trust the moment a human reads it.

It also helps to keep perspective. Not every employer uses an ATS in the same way, and small employers may read every application by hand. An ats friendly resume template works well in both cases, because the same qualities that help software — clear headings, standard titles, specific results, clean layout — also help a busy person scan your resume in seconds.

The Layout: One Column, Standard Sections, No Tricks

Use this structure, in this order, for most roles: 1. Name and contact details 2. Professional summary (2–3 lines) 3. Skills 4. Work experience 5. Education 6. Certifications and additional sections, if relevant

Keep these layout rules:

• Single column only. No sidebars, tables, text boxes, headers, footers, or columns. Parsers often read these out of order or miss them entirely.
• Standard fonts and sizes. Use a common font such as Arial, Calibri, Georgia, or Times New Roman, at 10–12 points for body text and slightly larger for headings. Avoid decorative fonts.
• Standard headings. Use exactly the words “Work Experience” or “Experience”, “Education”, and “Skills”. Creative headings such as “My Journey” or “Where I Shine” confuse parsers and recruiters alike.
• Simple bullet points. Use standard round bullets. Avoid icons, emojis, skill bars, star ratings, photos, and logos.
• Consistent dates. Write dates in one clear format, for example “Jan 2022 – Present” or “2022 – Present”, placed consistently for every role.
• File format that matches the posting. Submit a .docx file if the employer asks for Word or does not specify, because Word parses reliably almost everywhere. Use PDF only when the posting allows it and your PDF is generated from a simple text document, not from a design tool or image. Never submit an image or scanned resume.
• A keyword-based file name. Save the file as Firstname-Lastname-Resume.docx or similar. It looks professional in a recruiter’s downloads folder.

Length depends on experience. One page suits most students, graduates, and early-career applicants. Two pages are normal for experienced professionals. Longer resumes are rarely needed outside academic and some technical fields. Whatever the length, every line should earn its place with evidence relevant to the target role.

Section by Section: What to Write

Contact details

Place your name at the top in larger text, followed on plain lines by your city and region, phone number, professional email address, and a LinkedIn URL or portfolio link if you have one and it is up to date. Do not put contact details in a header or footer, because some parsers skip those areas. Do not include your full home address, date of birth, or a photo unless an employer in your country specifically requires them.

Professional summary

Write two or three lines tailored to the role: who you are, your most relevant experience or skill, and one proof point. Example for an administrative role: “Administrative assistant with three years of experience in a busy clinic office. Skilled in scheduling, records management, and patient communication. Recognised for reducing appointment errors by introducing a double-check booking system.” A summary is not a list of adjectives. Every claim in it should be supported somewhere below in your experience.

Skills

This is the section parsers and recruiters search most, so make it precise. List 8–12 skills that match the job description and that you can genuinely demonstrate. Write each skill in its standard form, and include the full name at least once where an abbreviation is common — for example, “Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”. Separate skills with commas or simple bullets on plain lines, not in a table.

Group your skills sensibly if the list is long: technical tools, then methods or processes, then languages or licences. Only list software, tools, and methods you have actually used. If you are building a skill the posting asks for, relevant free online courses with certificates can help you close a small gap honestly — but list a skill only once you can use it, not merely because you have started learning it.

Work experience

This is the heart of the resume, and the section where most templates fail by listing duties instead of results. For each role, give: job title, employer, location, and dates on clear separate lines, then three to five bullet points.

Use standard job titles — the title your employer used, or the closest standard equivalent if your internal title was unusual. Parsers and recruiters search by title, so honesty and clarity work together here.

Write each bullet using this pattern: action verb + task + result or scale. Compare: Weak: “Responsible for customer service.” Strong: “Resolved 30+ customer enquiries per day by phone and email, maintaining a 95% satisfaction rating over 12 months.” Weak: “Helped with stock.” Strong: “Counted and reconciled stock for a 400-line inventory, cutting monthly discrepancies by 20%.”

Use numbers wherever you honestly can: volumes, percentages, money, time saved, team size, deadlines met. If you do not have exact figures, use careful, truthful scale (“a team of four”, “daily”, “across three sites”). Never invent figures — recruiters probe them at interview.

Order roles in reverse chronological order, most recent first. Include relevant part-time, temporary, freelance, and voluntary work, especially if you are early in your career or changing fields. For career changers, a brief “Relevant Experience” heading above older unrelated work can help, but keep headings standard and explain the change honestly in your summary.

Education

List your highest and most relevant qualifications first: qualification name, institution, and completion year (or expected year). Include honours, relevant modules, or a strong final project only if they support the application. Experienced professionals can keep this section brief. Students and recent graduates may place education above work experience if their degree is their strongest and most recent evidence.

Certifications and additional sections

Add a separate “Certifications” section for licences and credentials relevant to the role, with the awarding body and year. Add “Projects” if you are in technology, design, data, or another portfolio field and your projects prove required skills. Add “Languages” with honest levels. Leave out hobbies unless they directly evidence a required skill.

The Keyword Method: Honest Matching, Step by Step

Keywords are how your resume is found in a search. The method is simple and must stay honest.

Step 1: Read the job description three times. Highlight the required skills, tools, qualifications, and duties that repeat. Repeated terms are the employer’s priorities.

Step 2: Make a match table. For each required term, write the evidence you have: where you used that skill, when, and with what result. If you have no evidence, leave that term out and note it as a gap to address for the future.

Step 3: Place keywords naturally. Put the most important matching skills in your Skills section, then show the top three to five in action inside your experience bullets, and reflect the role’s language in your summary. Use the employer’s exact term where it honestly describes what you did — for example, if they say “data entry” and you did data entry, use those words rather than a clever synonym.

Step 4: Use both full forms and abbreviations where natural. Write “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” once, then use the shorter form later if needed. Parsers do not always link the two.

Step 5: Check official language. For regulated or standardised roles, official sources such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook use the standard job titles and skill terms for occupations, which can help you describe your target role in the language employers expect.

Step 6: Never hide keywords. No white text, no tiny fonts, no keyword blocks pasted out of sight. Systems and recruiters treat hidden text as dishonesty, and it can end your application.

A Worked Example Structure

Here is the skeleton of an ats friendly resume template, filled with neutral example content so you can see the shape:

Name: Jordan Lee. Location / contact: Chicago, IL | phone | email | LinkedIn URL. Professional Summary: Customer service representative with four years of experience in retail and call centre environments. Skilled in complaint resolution, CRM record keeping, and team training. Consistently rated in the top group for customer satisfaction. Skills: Customer Service, Complaint Resolution, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Data Entry, Cash Handling, Team Training, Microsoft Excel, Scheduling.

Work Experience: Customer Service Representative — Example Retail Group, Chicago, IL — Mar 2021 – Present — Handled 40+ customer enquiries daily in person, by phone, and by email; Resolved complaints at first contact in most cases, escalating complex issues with full notes; Trained six new team members on till systems and service standards; Maintained accurate CRM records for all customer interactions. Education: High School Diploma — Example High School — 2020. Certifications: First Aid Certificate — 2023.

Adapt the wording entirely to your own record. The value is in the structure and the evidence style, not in copying example lines.

Tailoring Without Starting Over

You do not need to rebuild your ats friendly resume template for every application. Keep one strong master resume with all your experience and achievements. For each application, save a copy and make three focused changes: adjust the summary to the role, reorder and reword the Skills section to match the posting’s priorities, and reorder your experience bullets so the most relevant evidence comes first in each role. Ten to fifteen minutes of honest tailoring per application beats fifty identical submissions, because both the parser search and the recruiter scan reward relevance.

Keep a simple log of where you applied, with the date, employer, role, and the file version you sent. It prevents confusion when a recruiter calls about a version you no longer remember.

Common Mistakes That Cause Rejection

• Using a design-tool template with columns, tables, or text boxes. Visually impressive, mechanically unreadable. This is the most common avoidable cause of parsing failure.
• Putting key information in headers, footers, or images. Parsers frequently skip all three. Your name, contact details, and skills must be in the main body text.
• Creative section headings and job titles. “Experience” parses; poetry does not. Use the standard title for the work you did.
• Listing duties instead of results. Duties tell a recruiter what the job was. Results tell them how well you did it. Without results, you read as interchangeable with every other applicant.
• Keyword stuffing or hidden keywords. Found quickly, judged harshly. Match honestly or not at all.
• Submitting the wrong file type. An image, a scanned PDF, or a format the posting did not ask for can fail at upload or parsing.
• Typos in keywords and titles. A misspelled skill is a skill the search will not find. Proofread the Skills section and job titles character by character.
• One generic resume for every job. Untailored resumes miss the specific terms and priorities of each posting, in both search and human scanning.

Pre-Submission Checklist

Run through this list for every application:

• Single column, no tables, text boxes, images, or headers/footers holding key content
• Standard headings: Summary, Skills, Work Experience, Education, Certifications
• Job titles are standard and truthful; dates are consistent
• Skills section lists 8–12 honest skills matching the posting, full forms included
• Every experience bullet shows an action and, where possible, a measured result
• File saved in the requested format with a professional file name
• Plain-text test passed: copy the whole resume into a plain text editor — if the order and content still make sense, a parser will likely read it well
• Proofread once for meaning and once only for spelling of names, titles, and skills

That plain-text test is the single most useful check on this page. It takes one minute and reveals scrambled columns, lost sections, and symbols that turned into nonsense.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I use an ATS friendly resume template for every application?

Yes. For online applications, an ats friendly resume template is the safe default, and it also works well when a person reads your resume directly. The only common exception is a creative portfolio role where an employer explicitly asks for a designed portfolio — and even then, many employers still want a plain, parseable resume alongside it.

Is .docx or PDF better for applicant tracking systems?

Follow the job posting first. Where no format is specified, .docx is the most reliably parsed across older and newer systems. A PDF created from a simple text document is usually fine on modern systems, but a PDF exported from a design tool with columns and layers is risky. Never use an image-based file.

How do I know which keywords to include?

Take them from the job description itself: the required skills, tools, qualifications, and repeated duties. Include a keyword only where you have honest evidence for it, place the strongest matches in your Skills section, and show the most important ones in action in your experience bullets.

Can an ATS friendly resume still look professional?

Yes. Clean spacing, consistent headings, a readable font, and well-written bullets look professional to recruiters — often more professional than a heavily designed file, because they can find your evidence quickly. With an ats friendly resume template, design effort is better spent on clarity than on decoration.

What if I have little experience to put in the template?

Use the same structure and fill it with the evidence you do have: education and relevant modules, projects, voluntary work, part-time jobs, and transferable skills, all written as actions and results. Entry-level recruiters expect shorter records; they judge the clarity and honesty of what is there, not just its length.

Conclusion

An ats friendly resume template is not a trick to beat software — it is a clear, honest document that both software and people can read without friction. Build it in one column with standard headings, write experience as actions and results, match keywords truthfully to each job description, and run the plain-text test before you submit. Do that consistently, tailor briefly for each role, and your resume will reach the human reader it was written for — which is where your real qualifications can finally do their work.