ATS-friendly resume templates

A two-column resume is the single most common reason a student's application is thrown out by a machine before a person sees it. An applicant tracking system extracts the text from your PDF as one stream. When the page has a sidebar, that stream comes out interleaved: a line of your skills, a line of your degree, a line of your phone number, in the order the PDF happens to store them rather than the order you laid them out.

The parser then tries to find your degree in what it read and fails, or finds it attached to the wrong dates. The resume is scored low or filed as incomplete. Nobody tells you, because the rejection email does not mention formatting.

• One column. Content runs top to bottom in the order you want it read.
• No tables. Dates are right-aligned with a tab fill, not placed in a table cell — the text still extracts as one line.
• No text inside images. There are no images at all. A parser cannot read a picture, so a name inside a graphic is a resume with no name on it.
• Standard headings. Education, Experience, Projects, Skills, Achievements. Clever headings parse as nothing.
• Standard fonts. Times and Helvetica in the PDF; the LaTeX versions use the same faces.
• Nothing in the header or footer. Your email and phone number sit in the body of the page, because many parsers discard the header and footer regions.

The Download PDF button builds the file in your browser using the sample content, so you can see exactly what comes out before you commit to a layout. For your own details, use the builder — same templates, same PDF writer, your content.

Open in Overleaf passes Overleaf the address of the LaTeX source hosted here. Overleaf fetches it and opens it as a new project on your own account, where you can edit and recompile it as much as you like. Take that route if you already use LaTeX, if you want to keep tweaking the layout, or if your resume contains characters outside the Latin alphabet — LaTeX can embed a font that covers them, and the in-browser PDF writer cannot.

Download .tex gives you the same file to compile wherever you want.

Formatting is the easy half. The rest is content, and no template fixes it: a summary made of adjectives, bullets that describe duties instead of results, a skills list padded with things you cannot answer a question about, a photo (leave it off — it is not expected in India for software roles and it gives a parser nothing), and a two-page resume when you have one internship.

Name the file something a human can file: yourname-resume.pdf, not final_resume_v3(2).pdf. And send the PDF, never the Word file — a .docx re-flows on someone else's machine and your one-page resume becomes two.

We do not claim compatibility with any named ATS product, because we have not run these templates through one. Those systems are proprietary and mostly not available to test against. What we can state precisely is what the files do — single column, real selectable text, standard headings, no tables, no images, nothing in the header or footer — which is exactly what the published guidance from the vendors themselves asks for.