The Resume Format Recruiters Actually Want to See
Section order, file format, length, and layout — the formatting decisions that determine whether your resume gets parsed correctly and read at all.
Format questions come up more than almost any other resume question, and the answers are consistent enough to be worth writing down once. After reviewing more than 325,000 resumes across 15 years of recruiting, the format issues that hurt candidates fall into a few predictable categories.
Single Column Layout
Multi-column layouts look organized in a PDF viewer. Inside an applicant tracking system, columns often parse as one continuous text block — left column content followed immediately by right column content — which produces nonsense when a recruiter runs keyword searches or reads the parsed version.
Single column, top to bottom. The structure is simple and it works across every ATS and every screen size.
Section Order
The order of sections should reflect how a recruiter reads a resume: starting at the top and scanning for the most relevant information as fast as possible.
The order that works:
- Contact information (name, email, phone, LinkedIn, city and state)
- Professional summary (optional — only if it adds specific context, not a generic opener)
- Work experience, in reverse chronological order
- Education
- Skills
Experience before education. The exception is candidates within 12 months of graduation, where education goes first. After that, what you have done in the workforce outweighs where you went to school for the majority of roles.
File Format
Submit as PDF unless the job posting specifically requests a Word document. PDF preserves your formatting and prevents reformatting that happens when a recruiter's version of Word differs from yours.
The caveat: generate the PDF from the original source document, not by printing to PDF from a scan or image. A text-based PDF lets ATS extract the content. An image-based PDF is essentially invisible to the parser — the system sees a picture, not text.
What Goes in the Header
Name, email address, phone number, LinkedIn URL, and city and state. Full street address is not needed and wastes space. If your LinkedIn URL is long and auto-generated, customize it in your LinkedIn settings so it reads cleanly.
Leave out photos, headshots, birth dates, and physical descriptors. These are not standard in US applications and can introduce bias into the screening process before a recruiter has read a single line of your experience.
Length by Experience Level
One page for candidates with under five years of experience. Two pages for most others. The advice that resumes must always be one page predates modern ATS workflows and does not reflect how most recruiters actually work.
What matters is whether every line earns its place. A two-page resume with substantive accomplishments on both pages is more useful than a one-page resume padded to fill space or cut to the point of being incomplete.
Federal and academic CVs follow different conventions and run longer by design. If you are applying to federal roles, the format rules change substantially — word counts, supervisor contact information, salary history, and hours per week are all standard inclusions.
Font and Spacing
Use a standard, readable font (Calibri, Georgia, Arial, or Garamond) at 10.5 to 12 point for body text. Keep margins between 0.5 and 1 inch. Consistent spacing between sections makes the document faster to scan.
The design goal is readability at speed. A recruiter reviewing a high-volume pipeline will spend less time on a resume that requires effort to read.
ATS Compatibility Check
After formatting, select all the text in your resume and paste it into a plain text document. Read through it. If the structure makes sense — if the order of your experience and the content of your bullet points read clearly — the resume will likely parse correctly. If the text is jumbled or out of sequence, the formatting is the problem.
If you want to test your resume against a specific job description before submitting, Get Selected's resume analyzer shows you how your resume scores so you can address gaps before the application goes in.