If there’s a job that you are serious about scoring, we have modern resume templates you can use to get an edge over competitors. Check out our free downloadable modern resume templates to input your own information and create a winning resume.
Glimmer
Designer’s Touch
Open Entry
Framed
Block Step
Color Contrast
Casual Blue
Steely
Career Pitch
Organized
Creative Formal
Show and Tell
Skillful
Lists of Expertises
Formative Traditional
Cavalier
One Two Three
Score-Card
Advertise
Springing
Fades of Green
Lively Step
Bold Contrast
Foundation
Spirited Professional
Positive Showing
Refined
Prelude
Present Yourself
Check Box
Front and Center
What People Say
Functional Showcase
Logos
Testimonials
Open
Blocks
Salmon
Qualified
Busy hiring managers and recruiters won’t spend much time with your resume before deciding whether or not to discard it, so the design is very important.
A modern resume should be easy to read and attractively designed. Here are some of the major design elements to consider in a modern professional resume.
On modern resumes, fonts are important. You’ll want to avoid commonly used fonts like the ones we recommend that you avoid and choose a more interesting option, like Helvetica Neue or Georgia. We listed a few excellent font choices below, but these are just some of our favorite options. These are good starting fonts for your resume, but feel free to experiment with the various fonts offered by your word processor.
Do use these modern fonts:
Georgia: Georgia is a particularly good choice as it was designed to be easily read on a screen. This is a simple serif font that relies on round letters and generous spacing to make it highly readable on paper and screens.
Helvetica Neue: This minimal sans serif font is a reworking of the beloved Helvetica font. The letters have been redesigned to have a uniformed height and width, making it a bold, but safe, choice for modern job seekers.
Garamond: This serif font was influenced by the handwritten fonts of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance and was designed to be timeless. It’s easy to read and looks like an elevated Times New Roman font.
Verdana: This elegant sans serif font was specifically designed to be easy to read as a small print. It’s perfect for onscreen resumes, especially if your resume falls on the longer side and needs to fit into a one-page document.
Don’t use these dated fonts:
Times New Roman: Historically, Times New Roman was the default choice for resumes. On a modern resume though, this old-fashioned font can be seen as outdated, even boring.
Arial: Like it’s serif cousin above, Arial should be avoided on your modern template. It’s a fine sans serif choice for standard resumes, avoids decorative details in its design, and is screen-friendly. But it’s also an overused font and can make your resume look safe or generic.
Calibri: Again, this is a fine font choice if you’re playing it safe. This sans serif font is appealing and screen-friendly, but it is the default font on many word processors, including Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Using this font may seem like a safe or automatic choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All job seekers are uniquely qualified — some of you may benefit from using a modern resume template and some might severely damage their job search prospects. We’ll break down the pros and cons of using a modern resume layout. If the cons far outweigh the pros, you can also try our Resume Builder for step-by-step advice on how to build your own resume!
A standard chronological resume (a format that works its way back through your professional history, starting with your most recent position) includes five universal sections; contact information, summary statement, work history, skills and education. Your modern resume should include all these sections, but you can further elevate your hiring qualifications by adding these elements. 1. Contact Information: Like your template, your contact information should be modernized, too. For instance, a modern resume doesn’t need your full residential address. You can just include your city, state and ZIP code.2. Professional Summary: Resume Objectives (brief paragraphs that outline what you hope to gain from employment) are considered outdated in a modern resume. It can be assumed that an employer or recruiter already knows what your objective is since they have your resume in their hands.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.3. Achievements: 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.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. Write the name of the new software you learned or the percentage by which you increased sales at your last job.4. Machine Readability: Many large companies will use a software program to screen resumes. These applicant tracking systems (ATS) weed out resumes that appear to be a poor fit for the job.There are a number of proven tactics for making your resume ATS-friendly. Check out our ATS resume templates and writing guide for more details, and get your modern resume past these automatic systems and into the hands of hiring managers.
When designed and written correctly, a modern template is not unprofessional. Our templates are designed to share your employment history with hiring managers. They may use creative color palettes and playful design elements, but the main goal of these templates is to leave a positive, professional impression on a potential employer. As long as you stick to facts and share quantifiable metrics alongside your employment history, you’ll have an employer-friendly and professional document.
We’ll dive into additional details later, but not all job seekers may benefit from a typical resume like these basic templates. A modern resume may be a better design choice than a traditional format if you work in a creative industry, plan to change careers, or developed higher-than-average proficiencies in career-specific skills. The modern template is designed to showcase strong skill sets and successful metrics. It’s perfect for highly skilled job seekers who may not have a lot of formal work experience. If you’d like to try a different design, we share some of our favorite and successful options below.
Not all job seekers have the same experience or hiring strength — a resume template that benefits your friend may not be the best resume template for you. There are a variety of reasons why a modern template may not work for you: short work history, beginner-level comfort with your skills, lengthy gaps of time between jobs. If you’d like to see additional options, we broke down our favorite resume templates into specific writing guides with the hopes of helping you find your next job.1. Chronological resumes: This is the most commonly used resume format that is perfect for candidates with over 10 years of steady work experience, no work gaps, and trackable career growth.2. Functional resumes: The least common format, the functional resume shuns traceable work history in favor of acquired skills. This format dedicates multiple sections to elaborating on learned skills and techniques in order to highlight qualifications. It’s perfect for job seekers who are changing careers or have needed to take long breaks between employment positions.3. Combination resumes: This format is perfect for recent graduates, entry-level job seekers or career changers. The combination resume borrows strengths from both the chronological and functional resume to lend equal weight and importance to your learned skills and your formal work experience.4. ATS-friendly resumes: These are your best options if you’re only applying through online job boards. Most ATS can only read and parse your resume information from formulaic layouts — each of these designs carefully notes where to include your professional experience to increase your chances of an interview.5. Simple and clean resumes: Simple doesn’t always have to mean basic. If you’re uncomfortable with using colors and images to tell your professional story, you can still impress hiring managers by using one of these simple but elegant designs. They are designed to focus on your qualifications.
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