Column resume template

A label column down the left holds each section's name while the content sits beside it, which buys a lot of air without buying a second column of content. It suits someone with a short history — one or two roles, a degree, a few projects — because the layout reads as considered rather than as a page with gaps in it, and designers tend to like it for the same reason.

What it is not good for

The label column costs horizontal space on every line, so a long employer name and a long date range can wrap where they would not elsewhere. It is the wrong choice for a dense ten-year history.

What an ATS extracts from it

Below are the first lines of page one, taken from a real render of our sample resume in this template and extracted with pdfjs on . Line breaks are the extractor’s.

Priya Raghunathan
Senior Backend Engineer
[email protected] | +1 (415) 555-0142 | San Francisco, CA, USA | linkedin.com/in/priyaraghunathan
| github.com/praghunathan
Summary Backend engineer with eight years building payment and identity systems at scale. Led the
migration of a monolithic billing service to event-driven microservices serving 40M requests a day.
Comfortable owning a system end to end, from schema design through on-call.
Experience Northwind Payments Mar 2022 - Present
Senior Backend Engineer San Francisco, CA
Led the decomposition of a 400k-line billing monolith into eight event-driven services, cutting
median deploy time from 45 minutes to under 4.
Designed an idempotent ledger write path that eliminated double-charge incidents entirely
across 40M daily requests.
Cut p99 checkout latency by roughly 35% by replacing synchronous fraud checks with a queued
scoring pipeline .
Mentored four engineers and ran the team's on-call rotation and incident review process.
Lattice Health Jun 2019 - Feb 2022
Backend Engineer Austin, TX

Its score on our own rubric

Our sample resume, rendered in this template at normal density, scores 89 out of 100. The deductions that remain are properties of the sample’s writing, not of the template — which is the point of showing it: the layout is not what is costing points.

CategoryScored
Contact completeness12 / 12
Parseability20 / 20
Section structure12 / 12
Dates10 / 10
Bullet quality15 / 16
Quantification10 / 12
Skills coverage6 / 8
Length & density4 / 10

How each category is weighted and what loses it.

Length at each density

The same sample resume, in this template, at the three spacing settings the editor offers:

  • Compact: 2 pages
  • Normal: 2 pages
  • Roomy: 2 pages

Your own resume will differ — this is one document measured in eight templates so the comparison between them means something.

Other templates