Resume toolkit

Most large companies, and an increasing number of campus placement cells, put every uploaded resume through an applicant tracking system first. The ATS does not look at your resume; it reads the text out of the PDF and files it into fields — name, email, degree, college, skills, dates. Anything it cannot place, it discards.

That is why a beautifully designed resume can score worse than a plain one. A two-column layout, a name inside a graphic, contact details in the page header, skills laid out in a table with rating bars — each of those is a thing the parser reads out of order or does not read at all. The student never finds out, because the rejection says nothing about formatting.

It is a short and unglamorous list. One column, top to bottom. No tables and no text boxes. No text inside images — a parser cannot read a picture, and a logo with your name in it makes your name invisible. Standard section headings, spelled the boring way: Education, Experience, Projects, Skills. A standard font. Contact details in the body of the page rather than in a header or footer, because a lot of parsers throw those regions away entirely.

Every template here follows that list, and the builder cannot produce anything that breaks it. What is left to you is the content — which is the part that actually decides the outcome.

One page. Contact details, then education with your CGPA, then any internship or job, then projects, then skills, then achievements. If you have no internship yet, projects move up — a second-year with two real, working projects is more interesting than one with a summary paragraph full of adjectives.

Write bullets that start with a verb and end with a number wherever you can honestly manage one: how many users, how much faster, how many teams, what the score was. “Worked on the backend” says nothing. “Built 9 REST endpoints used by 40 support agents” says the same thing and can be asked about in an interview.

We have not tested these templates against any specific commercial ATS product, and we would not believe anyone who claims to have tested against all of them — the systems are proprietary, they change, and most of them are not available to test with. What we can say is what the templates do: single column, real text, standard headings, no tables or images. That is what every published guidance from the vendors themselves asks for.