Modern résumé

A colour band across the top, a sans-serif face, and — in most of them — a narrow column down one side for skills and contact details. Two of those three are harmless.

What this layout usually means

  • A coloured or shaded header containing the name and job title
  • A narrow sidebar, usually a third of the width, holding skills and contact details
  • Sans-serif type, generous spacing, a rule under each heading
  • Sometimes a small circular photograph

What happens when a machine reads it

Not an opinion about design. These are the things a text extractor does with a page, and you can watch ours do them to your own file at the bottom of this page.

The sidebar
Text extractors read a page in reading order, not in visual columns. A sidebar beside your first job is commonly interleaved with it line by line, so "Epic" and "ACLS" end up inside a sentence about running a ward, and none of it matches anything.
The header band
Harmless when it is coloured text, fatal when it is an image. If the name and title were exported as part of a graphic, the document opens with no name and no job title — and the title is the hardest filter there is.
The photograph
Carries nothing readable, and in the United States many employers discard résumés with one to avoid a discrimination claim. It costs space and gains nothing.

Usable with care

The typography is fine. Drop the sidebar into the main column and check the header is real text, and a modern layout reads as well as a simple one.

Write one instead

Our builder writes the structure above, exports as PDF, Word or plain text, and shows you what a parser reads back as you type. Free, no account, and the download is not the paywall.

Open the free builder

Or check the one you have

Drop it here and see the text a screening system gets — which sections it finds, which it loses, and what it decides you do for a living. Read in this tab; nothing is uploaded.

Your file is read by code running in this tab. It is never sent anywhere, and we never see it. Open your browser’s network tab and drop it again — you will see no upload.