The visual design of your resume is as important as the information you share with potential employers. Thankfully, there are multiple ways to download or make your resume template. We’ll help you create a Microsoft Word resume from scratch or help you format our free resume template downloads with this free guide.
Microsoft Word offers a small library of pre-built resume templates that you can use as your application starting point. You can find these resources through your Microsoft 365 membership.
Your name and contact information sits at the top of your resume. Make it easy for employers to access your information, and include the following mandatory information.
Required information:
Optional information:
This two- to three-sentence paragraph sits just underneath your contact information and acts as a marketing pitch for your hiring potential. Your goal is to solve the hiring manager’s problem by explaining how you can quickly fill a position and use your skills to help the company.
This quick pitch can impress a hiring manager and encourage them to read the rest of your resume, especially if you can use a specific example of your professional success and how it relates to the job requirements. You can use the following template to start your summary statement:
“A/n [adjective] and [adjective] [former job position] with [number] years of experience in [relevant skill] and [relevant skill] can help fill the open [name of position] opportunity with your company. Previous experience with [job requirement] resulted in [quantifiable metric] growth for [name of current employer]. Excited to share this experience and potential success with [name of hiring company].”
Most resumes follow the same simple layout to showcase your work experience:
Most resumes follow the same simple layout to showcase your work experience:
Work ExperienceRecent or Current Job Title, Name of Company
MM/YYYY –– MM/YYYY
MM/YYYY –– MM/YYYY
MM/YYYY –– MM/YYYY
Editor pro tip: This work experience layout works best if you work at each job for a year or more before you transfer to another job opportunity. If you recently graduated from school, took a break between jobs, or work on short-term contracts, consider using this skills-based resume format instead.
Your college degree or trade school certificate can help convince employers that you studied and successfully trained to pursue a job in this career. If you hold a relevant degree or certificate in the open job position, add this information using the following text template:
Skills are the bread and butter of your resume. Your education or experience doesn’t matter if you haven’t learned or shared any of the skills that make you an effective employee or suitable job candidate. Your skills section should follow the following layout and feature a fair balance of soft, hard, and technical skills:
Soft skills: Also known as core skills, these personal skills help you interact with your colleagues, customers, and various social environments. They include communication skills, teamwork, time management, critical thinking, and many more social skills.
Hard skills: Also known as trained skills, these are learned abilities that you search in specific fields of study such as sales, data management, accounting skills, or mathematical skills. Technical skills: These specialized hard skills relate to technology and are linked to IT knowledge, software familiarity, programming languages or task management programs.
If you don’t have a subscription to Microsoft 365 or would like to find additional free resume templates, Hloom has a vast library of free downloadable templates. We pulled together a few of our favorite free templates below, but feel free to visit our resume templates library for more styles and options.
You can choose one of two options to label your resume sections: one of Microsoft’s pre-formatted heading options or create your own custom text treatment.
To use one of the pre-formatted heading options:
To create your own:
Do the same with all of the following section headers:
If you scroll to the bottom of our free templates, you might see a small legal disclaimer. We made this easy for you to remove for your personal use. Simply click your cursor over the main body of the text and drag your mouse down until you highlight the whole text box. Simply hit your delete button, remove the legal disclosure, and your recent download is ready to customize.
We recommend setting 1-inch margins across your resume template. But if you’re using a design that looks best with smaller margins or you need a little more space on the page, you can easily customize your margins through Microsoft Word.
Spacing refers to the line spacing between sentences and paragraphs. For example, most academics require double-spacing throughout their documents, which creates a white space the height of a normal letter between each sentence break.
Resumes don’t follow the same strict rules as academic resumes, so you’re free to choose single-, 1.5, or double-space line breaks between your sentences and resumes. We recommend that you choose single-space breaks between sentences and double-space breaks between paragraphs to create natural white space borders throughout your resume.
Your resume is a reflection of your professional persona. Your font choice should be functional and legible in both screen and print form. We recommend a few fonts that can be used under a variety of different job opportunities.
Screen-friendly fonts that we recommend for online job applications:
The following fonts are safe and traditional but slightly overused and therefore not recommended by us:
Once you’re happy with your resume design and content, save your resume in both the .docx and .pdf file formats.
A .docx format guarantees that your document opens exactly as you designed it when opened in Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, the formatting might alter if your recipient opens your document in an alternate word processor like Google Docs or iOS Pages. To save your document:
A .pdf format guarantees that your document opens with the same format, layout, and design, regardless of the reader’s operating system or word processor:
Our Hloom resume templates are specifically designed to let you further customize and tailor the look and layout of your document. The following videos will help you adapt the content, layout, color schemes, and font choices to create a truly personalized and professional resume.
Microsoft offers preprogrammed resume templates and a library of user-generated resumes through their online catalogs.
In addition to Microsoft Office, all of our free resume templates are Microsoft-friendly and easy to use.
Although Microsoft Office is the most widely used word processing program, we offer free resume templates for free word processors.
ATS, also known as applicant tracking systems, scan your resume for specific job requirements and layouts. To pass an ATS, do the following.
Your 2023 resume needs to include the following information
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