The ATS Friendly resume template

What it deliberately does not do

No sidebar. No colour. No icons. No photo. No tables. No text inside images. No decorative bullet glyphs. Nothing in a header or footer.

Every one of those absences is a parsing failure mode removed. The result is a document that looks like everyone else's — which is the trade you are making.

Why plain still matters

Applicant tracking systems read a resume as a single stream of text. The most common way that goes wrong is a two-column layout being read across instead of down, so your skills rail interleaves with your job history and comes out as "Python Senior Engineer SQL Northwind Analytics".

You cannot tell which parser a company runs, and you get no feedback when it goes wrong — just silence. This template removes the possibility.

When to use it

• The posting names a specific ATS, or you are uploading through Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse, iCIMS or SuccessFactors.
• You are applying at volume and cannot tailor the format per company.
• You have sent thirty applications with a designed resume and heard nothing, and want to eliminate formatting as the cause.
• A recruiter has asked for a "plain" or "text" version.

When not to

If a person opens your file first — an agency, a studio, a startup, a referral, a small company — this template spends none of the goodwill a good-looking document buys you. Use something from the professional or modern collections instead, and keep this one for portals.

Keeping both costs nothing here: switch template, same content.

Filling it in

Use the expected headings. Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications. The template supplies them; do not rename them to something clever.

Front-load each bullet. With no visual hierarchy to help, the first four or five words of every line carry the whole weight. Start with the verb and the outcome.

Spell out acronyms once. "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)" catches both the spelled-out and abbreviated keyword. After that, use whichever the posting uses.

Keep skills as a comma list. The template renders them inline on purpose — it is the most reliably parsed shape.

Put contact details in the body. Already handled: nothing lives in a header or footer, because many parsers skip those entirely.

The paste test

Before you send any resume, do this:

1. Open the exported PDF.
2. Select all, copy.
3. Paste into a plain text editor.
4. Read it top to bottom.

That is approximately what the parser sees. If the order is wrong, or your phone number vanished, or two sections have run together, fix it before you apply. On this template the paste test comes out clean, which is the entire point of it.

There is more detail on parsing behaviour in how ATS software actually works.