What is the most professional template for a resume?

Question

Zippia Team · Accepted Answer

The most professional template for a resume depends on many factors, such as the industry, the stage of your career, and whether it's ATS reader-friendly, to name a few. When designing your resume, there are templates to choose from, and some are much better than others.

When deciding on a professional template, keep in mind that some styles are more geared toward specific industries and career stages.

Each style has a different way of making it even easier to understand what the most relevant information to include is and helping you stand out. We recommend researching and looking at resumes of those already in the position you wish to apply for.

Whatever template you choose, the most important factor is compatible with applicant tracking systems (ATS). That's a computer program that filters resumes removing those that don't "match" basic qualifications for the position.

Resumes with too much fancy formatting, for example, often get scrambled going through the ATS and never make it to recruiters (or read like gibberish if they do. Certain design elements like columns, text boxes, headers, footers, images, graphs, and graphics can cause an ATS to read out of order or drop things entirely.