CV templates
How to choose a CV template
A gallery shows you 20 layouts and leaves the decision entirely to taste, which is why people spend an hour on it and then pick the one with the nicest header. These pages make the decision smaller. Three questions settle it, and the categories below are what the answers point at.
Three questions that decide it
Answer these before you look at a single preview. They eliminate most of the collection in about a minute.
- Who opens the file first, a parser or a person? A large company's careers portal usually means extraction happens before any human reads it, and reading order becomes a real risk. A referral, a direct email or a small employer means a person opens the PDF and the risk disappears. If you genuinely do not know, assume the parser.
- What register does the sector expect? Law, banking, public sector and much of academia read a colour band as a misjudgement. Product, tech, marketing and startups read a plain single column as indifference. Neither reaction is about quality, and both are real.
- How much career is there to lay out? A layout built for six roles leaves holes with two in it, and a layout built for a first job wastes half a page on education when you have twelve years behind you. Match the structure to the amount of evidence you actually have.
| If | Start with |
|---|---|
| A parser reads it first and you know nothing else | ATS-friendly |
| Corporate, finance, consulting, conservative sector | Professional |
| Product, tech, marketing, startup, a person is reading | Modern |
| Student, intern, graduate scheme, first job | Student |
| Director level and above, scope and decisions to show | Executive |
These overlap on purpose. Several layouts appear in two categories, because a template is a shape rather than a genre.
The five categories
-
ATS-friendly
Layouts whose text survives extraction whole and in order: one reading column, real headings, contact details in the body. The safe default when you do not know how the file will be handled, and the wrong choice for a design application.
-
Professional
Quiet documents that make no argument of their own, so the reader forms an opinion about your experience rather than your taste. Corporate, consulting, finance, operations and legal.
-
Modern
Design used as a second channel: colour with a job, a narrative column beside a reference column, real type contrast. Buys attention in a pile, costs you something in a conservative room.
-
Student
A different sequence, not a shorter one. Education, projects and part-time work lead, because that is where a first-job applicant's evidence actually is.
-
Executive
Positioning in the top third, scope stated numerically, early career compressed to a line per role. For applications where the reader is a board member or a search consultant.
Three kinds of layout do not have a category page here, because each would hold one genuinely relevant template and a category with one member is not a category. They are in the gallery: Creative Portfolio for design and visual roles, Medical / Healthcare for clinical applications, and Academic / Research for publication-led CVs. There are also two sector sheets for hospitality, Grand Hotel and Hospitality Service, the first built for luxury and heritage venues and the second for guest-facing and front-office work.
How this choice usually goes wrong
- Picking for yourself rather than for the reader. The document is not for you. The only question is what it does in the hands of the person opening it.
- Changing the layout instead of the content. If two dozen applications have produced nothing, a new template will not change that. The bullets will.
- Using one layout for every application. The portal version and the referral version of the same CV can reasonably be different files. Keeping two exports is cheaper than compromising between them.
- Assuming a plain layout is always safest. It is safest against a parser. Against a design reviewer, a creative director or a startup founder, it is a signal of its own.
- Letting the template decide the length. A layout that fills two pages with one year of experience is padding, whatever the preview looked like.
- Never checking the exported file. The preview in a builder and the text a parser extracts are two different objects, and only one of them is what an employer receives.
What a template can and cannot do
A template controls three things: whether your text can be extracted, how fast a human can find the part they care about, and what register you appear in. Those are worth getting right, and none of them is the reason most applications end.
Applications end because the content does not give a reader anything to act on. Responsible for. Involved in. Worked closely with. A layout renders those faithfully at any level of polish. The order that works is to fix the sentences, then choose the layout that presents them without obstruction, then verify the export rather than assuming it.
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