ATS-Friendly Resume Templates
Five Word templates, one for each career stage. Each is a single column of real text with standard section headings, which is what an applicant tracking system can parse without dropping half your experience. Download one, fill it with your own work, send it.
An ATS-friendly resume template is a document an applicant tracking system can read end to end: one column, real text instead of graphics, standard section headings such as Summary, Experience, Education and Skills, and nothing hidden in tables, text boxes, headers or footers. The five templates on this page are free Word files built to that standard by Oleg Sotnikov, who has interviewed and hired engineers for 25+ years from the hiring manager's side of the table. Fill one in with your own work, then run it through the free ATS resume checker before you apply.
The ATS-Friendly Resume Format
This is the resume format for ATS, read from the top of the page down. The five files below follow it, and you can apply the same order to a resume you already have.
- 1
Contact details at the top, in the body
Name, city, email, phone and one profile link, above the first heading. No street address, no photo.
- 2
Summary, then Skills
Two or three lines on what you build and at what level, then a plain list of your tools.
- 3
Experience in reverse-chronological order
Newest role first. Company, title, then dates as Mon YYYY – Mon YYYY, which is how a parser works out your years of experience.
- 4
Education and extras at the bottom
Degree, school, year, then certifications, patents or talks, one per line. New graduates move this block above Experience.
- 5
One column, standard headings, real text
Summary, Experience, Education and Skills, spelled that way. No table cells, no text boxes, nothing that exists only inside an image.
- 6
Saved as .docx or a text-based PDF
A .docx is the safest default. A PDF works when its text is still selectable, which rules out anything scanned.
What Makes a Template ATS-Friendly
Six rules. Every template on this page follows all six, and most resume designs sold online break at least three.
One column
A parser flattens the page into a stream of text. Two columns come out interleaved, so job titles land in the middle of a skills list. One column keeps the reading order identical for the machine and the human.
Real text, not pictures
A name set inside a logo, a skills bar chart, or a header exported as an image is invisible to the parser. Everything that matters has to be selectable text.
Standard section headings
Systems segment a resume by the words Summary, Experience, Education and Skills. A heading like "Where I've Been" is clever, and it costs you the whole section.
No tables or text boxes
This is where content goes missing. Some parsers read table cells out of order, others skip text boxes entirely. Plain paragraphs survive every system.
Nothing in headers or footers
Contact details placed in the page header are a common way to lose a phone number, because several parsers never look there. Keep the contact line in the body, at the top.
Standard fonts, .docx file
Calibri, Arial, Georgia — fonts every system already has, so nothing gets substituted or garbled. Save as .docx unless the posting asks for a PDF.
Five Templates
Pick the one closest to the job you are applying for. Each file is a sample ATS-friendly resume you can download and edit: the same parser-safe skeleton, with sections and example bullets written for that level.
Software Engineer Resume
Two to six years in, applying for individual-contributor roles. Skills sit high, because that is what the first screen is looking for.
Sections in the file
- Summary
- Skills
- Experience
- Projects
- Education
Senior Software Engineer Resume
You own a system end to end, at senior or staff level. The extra section is there for design docs, migrations and the people you brought up.
Sections in the file
- Summary
- Skills
- Experience
- Technical Leadership
- Education
Engineering Manager Resume
You lead people. Team size, budget and hiring get their own block instead of hiding inside job bullets.
Sections in the file
- Summary
- Experience
- Leadership and Scope
- Skills
- Education
CTO Resume
Executive and board-level scope: organization, budget, compliance. Room for patents, talks and advisory work, which matter at this level and nowhere below it.
Sections in the file
- Summary
- Experience
- Patents and Talks
- Board and Advisory
- Skills
- Education
New Graduate Resume
No full-time experience yet. Education and projects come first, internships after, and the summary states what you can build rather than what you want.
Sections in the file
- Summary
- Education
- Projects
- Experience
- Skills
About the format
These files are written for the US and international market: US Letter page size, month-and-year dates, no photo and no date of birth. If you apply somewhere with different conventions, change the wording and keep the structure.
How to Use a Template
Fill it with your real work
Replace every bracket with something that actually happened. A bullet lands when it carries a verb, a number and a result: "Cut checkout latency by 40% by moving image resizing to the edge." When you have no number, describe the change and its scale.
Tailor it to each posting
Read the posting and take the words it uses for the tools and responsibilities you genuinely have. Put those words in your summary, your skills block and the bullets where you did the work. One tailored resume beats twenty copies of the same file.
Run it through the ATS checker
Paste the finished text into the free checker and see what a parser sees: which sections it found, whether your contact details were detected, how much of the posting's vocabulary you actually match.
Open the ATS resume checkerNext Steps
A template only fixes the shape of the document. These deal with what goes inside it and what happens after you send it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a resume template ATS-friendly?
An ATS-friendly template stays simple enough for a parser to read in one pass: a single column, real text rather than images, standard headings (Summary, Experience, Education, Skills), and no tables, text boxes, headers or footers. Standard fonts and a .docx file finish the job. The document can still look designed — it just has to stay out of the parser's way.
Should I send a DOCX or a PDF?
DOCX parses most reliably and is the safe default when the posting says nothing. Modern systems handle PDF fine as long as it contains real text rather than an exported image, and a PDF holds your layout together on someone else's machine. When the posting names a format, follow the posting — that instruction is often a filter in itself.
Should a resume be one page or two?
It depends on how much you have done. Under roughly ten years of experience, one page is usually enough and reads better. Senior engineers, managers and executives routinely need two, and an executive with patents, talks and board work sometimes needs a third. Length is rarely the problem; padding is.
Do design elements hurt an ATS resume?
Some of them do. Photos, icons, skill rating bars, sidebars and multi-column layouts either vanish during parsing or scramble the reading order. Bold text, a rule under each heading and generous white space cost nothing and still read as a designed document. The templates here use only the second kind.
Where should keywords go in a resume?
In the places where you did the work: the summary line, the skills block, and the bullets under the job where you used the tool. Reuse the posting's own wording for anything you genuinely have, because many systems match on exact strings and "PostgreSQL" and "Postgres" are not always the same token. Never paste a hidden keyword list in white text — parsers read it as plain text and recruiters see it immediately.
What is the best resume format for ATS?
Reverse-chronological, in a single column, with the standard headings Summary, Experience, Education and Skills, and the contact line in the body rather than the page header. Save it as a .docx, or a PDF that still has selectable text. Each of the five files on this page is a sample ATS-friendly resume built that way.
Have a Hiring Manager Read It
I have interviewed and hired engineers for 25+ years, so I read resumes the way the person deciding on you reads them. Bring yours to a free 30-minute call and I will tell you what a hiring manager sees in the first ten seconds.
30 minutes, no pitch. English or Russian, US Pacific hours.
Related reading
Notes on hiring, AI, and how engineering teams actually work.
