63 Modern Resume Templates: Writing Guide and Tips

Use simple and legible colors

Color is a good way to make your modern resume shine. Now that resumes are often sent to employers online, the expense of color printing is avoided.

• Use simple colors: Keep your color palette professional but minimal. A general rule of website design is to use three to five colors throughout your design, including black and white. You should follow that same design rule on your modern resume and cover letter.
• Use colors as accents: You might color only your section headers, or you could choose a template with a colored design from our options above.
• Use legible colors: Always use colors that are easy to see. Darker colors, like navy and burgundy, will look best for text, especially against a white background. Light colors, like yellow, are too difficult to read against standard white backgrounds, can strain the readers’ eye, and can look unprofessional.

Make your resume concise and skimmable

A hiring manager probably isn’t going to read your resume from top to bottom until after you’ve made it through the initial selection process. They often make those early decisions in a matter of seconds.

• Highlight key information: Help guide recruiters and hiring managers who are just skimming resumes. You can use bold fonts to highlight your major achievements or strategically use color in crucial sections to draw the eye there first.
• White space: One-inch margins and white space between your modern resume sections creates clear breaks between the content and allows for easy skimming, so don’t sacrifice this necessary space to stuff your resume with excess information.
• Use bullet points: You want to mark each new accomplishment or responsibility with bullet points. This adds extra emphasis to the information while allowing the hiring manager to easily skim and find these professional details.
• Use industry shorthand: If there’s a common acronym or abbreviation for a term in your industry, be sure to spell it out at least once in your resume before using the insider term, in case the person reading your resume is not familiar with the abbreviation.

Keep your resume to one page for each decade of work

It’s important that everything on your resume is essential. Two pages of relevant information is good; two pages of filler is not. The general rule is that you should have around one page on your resume for every ten years of work experience.

• One-page resume: One page resumes are great, but the strategic use of columns, skills rating graphs, and borders can make modern resumes longer than one page. If you’re using this layout, your resume will be one page if you have less than 10 years of experience.
• Two-page resume: This resume length is appropriate if you have a lot of work experience. Employers would rather read a multi-page professional resume than a one-page resume that’s crammed with information in a tiny font.

Add infographics to demonstrate skills and achievements

Some jobs, like medical assisting, require a specific skill set that should go in a Skills section. For a job that doesn’t require such specific knowledge, don’t have a Skills section, and list your achievements instead. Infographics such as rated skills or bar graphs can help you include specific numbers or metrics in a visually appealing way that is easy for hiring managers to scan and understand.

• Key or core qualifications: A modern resume relies so heavily on distinct sections and columns. This design choice can let you create an additional skills section that focuses on your core competencies, and grants you an additional opportunity to impress hiring managers.
• Rating skills: This style of resume template dedicates crucial space to your skills section by allowing you to rate the strength of your skills on an easily understood numerical scale. This allows you to communicate your familiarity with hard and technical skills for hiring managers through visual clues.
• Experience timelines: This design element can help hiring managers understand how your professional career has unfurled over the last few years.

Update your contact information with professional social media accounts and websites

If you have actively used work-appropriate social media accounts that can be leveraged for professional purposes, you should add hyperlinks to these relevant social media pages. Make sure to keep your social media accounts professional and polished.

• LinkedIn: If you have a detailed and thorough LinkedIn account, hyperlink it in your Contact Information section. If you’re applying for a job that will involve social media use, such as corporate online reputation management, include links to your other social media accounts, too, like Twitter and Instagram.
• Engagement metrics: A modern template is ideal for job seekers looking for work in social media marketing. The use of graphs and infographics allows you to highlight successful metrics such as user engagement and viral posts from either your personal or professional social media accounts.

If you have a personal website, published writing samples or an online portfolio, link that in your Contact Information section, as long as it’s relevant to your desired job.

• Resume website: As job searches and application processes are moved online, more job seekers are moving their resumes online. We still recommend that you write a tailored resume for each job application, but these pages are simple summaries of your entire professional experience. You can create a supplementary resume website that outlines all of your achievements and qualifications, not just the ones that best suit the needs of the open job. This gives curious hiring managers an additional chance to learn more about you and your skills before or after an interview.
• Online portfolio: An online resume summarizes and describes your skills and abilities; your portfolio demonstrates this information through tangible examples of your previous work. Photographers, copywriters, marketers, designers, architects or event organizers can benefit greatly from adding links to their online portfolio.

Prioritize your summary statement

Include a Professional Summary that states what you have to offer the employer as a candidate, instead of what you’re looking for. This is an especially good idea if you have a long work history.

Your professional summary should be a synopsis of your job history and can include your years of experience, job history highlights or major accomplishments, especially if the accomplishments are similar to the stated responsibilities of an open job position.

Demonstrate your achievements with evidence

Most job candidates only list their responsibilities and duties, which can fail to show how skilled they are in their work. Adding your achievements and successes demonstrate that you are highly skilled in these job-related tasks, rather than just trained.

Achievements don’t generally need their own separate section unless you have a lot of measurable achievements to list. You can work them into your Experience or Work History section. Tell recruiters about things you accomplished or skills you mastered at each past job. If you can include specifics or numbers, that’s even better.

For example, if you helped establish an office protocol that reduced wait time or launched a new social media campaign that increased knowledge or interests about a business, find those statistics and showcase them on your resume while explaining how your contributions led to those improvements.