Judging a template: its three jobs, columns and hierarchy

A template decides a lot before you write a word. It decides whether a parser can read you, whether a skimmer can find your level, and whether tailoring the next application takes ten minutes or an evening.

This section is about judging templates, so you can pick a good one or fix the one you have. This lesson sets the standard a template must meet, then applies it to the two decisions that matter most: how many columns, and how the hierarchy is built.

What a template must do

Before choosing a template, know what you are judging it against. A template has exactly three jobs, and one that fails any of them is disqualified regardless of how it looks.

The three jobs

1. Parse cleanly. A machine must be able to extract your name, employers, titles, dates, and skills in the right order (see What an ATS actually does). If it cannot, you vanish from recruiter searches.

2. Skim well. A human must be able to find your role, level, and one achievement in six seconds (the six-second test). This requires visible hierarchy and real whitespace.

3. Stay editable. You will tailor this document dozens of times (see Tailoring to a job description). If adding one bullet breaks the layout across two pages, you will stop tailoring, and tailoring matters more than the template does.

Judging a template in two minutes

Most templates that fail, fail the first check — usually because they are two-column.

Why most attractive templates fail

Resume templates are largely designed by graphic designers optimising for how a page looks in a portfolio, not for how it performs in a hiring pipeline. That produces the recurring offenders: two columns, sidebars, icons, skill bars, and colour blocks.

They are genuinely nicer to look at. They are also less likely to get you an interview.

One column or two

Since two columns cause most failures, the column count is the most consequential template decision, and it has a clear default.

Use one column

For the main content flow — experience, education, projects — use a single column.

The reason is mechanical. A parser reads a document in its underlying order, which for a two-column layout may be: all of the left column, then all of the right. Or it may interleave them. Or it may read across rows, producing lines like Skills Senior Backend Engineer Go, Python Kestrel Systems.

You cannot predict which, because there are dozens of parsers.

The narrow case for two columns

A two-column layout can work when the second column carries only non-essential information — a short skills list or contact links — and nothing there is load-bearing.

Even then, weigh the benefit honestly. The gain is a slightly denser page. The risk is a parsing failure you cannot detect from the outside.

For most people the answer is one column.

Getting the benefits without the risk

The appeal of two columns is usually saving vertical space. There are safer ways:

• Right-align dates on the same line as the job title. Uses horizontal space without creating a column.
• Put skills on three or four wrapped lines rather than in a sidebar.
• Put contact details on one or two lines under your name.

These recover most of the space at none of the risk.

Typography and hierarchy

With one column settled, the template's next job is the skim. Hierarchy is what makes a six-second read possible. Without it, a skimmer has no way into the page and takes away nothing.

Three levels is enough

Four levels start to compete with each other. Two are not enough to navigate by.

Build hierarchy from size and weight

Not from colour. Not from boxes or background fills.

Test it: convert your resume to greyscale. If the structure still reads, your hierarchy is built correctly.

Font choice

Less important than people think. Any well-made, widely available font works. What matters:

• One family throughout. Two is the maximum, and only if one is used exclusively for headings.
• Available on the reader's machine, if you send anything other than PDF.
• Not condensed, not decorative, not a display face.
• Distinguishable characters — check that capital I, lowercase l, and the digit 1 are not identical, since technical resumes contain version numbers and identifiers.

Do not spend time on serif-versus-sans arguments. Nobody has been rejected over it.

Alignment and consistency

Consistency reads as care, and inconsistency is one of the few things a reader consciously notices:

• All dates in the same format and the same alignment.
• All bullets using the same character and the same indent.
• Equal space before every section heading.
• Company names treated identically everywhere.