ATS-friendly resume templates for Google Docs™

The rules, and why each one matters

1. One column, top to bottom. Parsers read lines left to right. Two columns side by side get read as one line that mixes both, so a job title can end up glued to a skill.
2. No tables, text boxes or shapes. Many parsers skip text boxes entirely, and table cells can come out in an odd order. We line dates up with a right tab stop instead.
3. Nothing important in the header or footer. Some systems ignore headers and footers. Your name and contact details sit in the body of the page.
4. Standard section names, on their own line. Parsers look for words like Experience, Education, Projects and Skills to know where each section starts. Our headings are short, bold and in capitals, which is the pattern the parser we test with looks for first.
5. Plain bullets and text you can select. Bullets set in symbol fonts often turn into private-use characters when extracted. Ours use the regular bullet character (•) in the body font, and we check the extracted text for stray symbols.
6. No icons, photos, skill bars or ratings. They carry no text a system can read, and a 4-out-of-5 skill bar means nothing to anyone.
7. Left-aligned text, no justified paragraphs. Justified text stretches the spaces between words, which we suspect can split words when text is extracted. We haven't tested it yet, so we simply don't use it. Left-aligned text is also easier to read.
8. Write contact details out in full. Write linkedin.com/in/yourname rather than a LinkedIn icon. A link hidden behind an icon is invisible to a parser.

What “ATS-friendly” can and can't promise

An applicant tracking system stores applications; most also parse resumes into fields like name, job titles and dates so recruiters can search them. Each vendor uses its own parser, and none of them publish how it works. So when a site says a template is “ATS-approved”, ask: approved by which system, and how would you check?

We take a narrower, checkable approach. Every sample resume is downloaded from Google Docs as a PDF and run through OpenResume, an open-source parser, at a pinned version. The template page shows each field we expected and what the parser found. Anyone can rerun it. It doesn't predict Workday or Greenhouse, and it says nothing about your own content, but it does catch the layout problems listed above. Read how we test.

We also don't give scores. A 0–100 “ATS score” mixes layout with keyword guesses, and it's usually there to sell you a rewrite.