Free Resume Templates

How the template looks. Style is the least important variable in whether you get shortlisted, and the one people spend the most time on.

• Modern resume templates - clean contemporary layouts for tech, product, marketing and startup roles.
• Traditional resume templates - the conventional layout most Indian employers expect. The safe default.
• Simple resume templates - no colour, no ornament, maximum readability. Best for conservative sectors.
• Creative resume templates - for portfolio-led roles where presentation is part of the assessment.

How the template is built. This is the variable that decides whether an applicant tracking system can read you.

• ATS resume templates - single column, standard headings, no tables or graphics. Parses cleanly everywhere.

• One page resume templates - for freshers and anyone under three years of experience.

• Two page resume templates - for experienced professionals with enough relevant material to justify it.

• Two column resume templates - sidebar layouts. Safe on modern systems, riskier on legacy enterprise ones.

• Photo resume templates - for the specific roles and employers that ask for a photograph.

Resume Templates by Format

The order your information appears in. Choose this before you choose a style.

These get used interchangeably, and it costs people interviews.

A resume format is the order your information appears in - whether you lead with work history, skills, or education. There are three, and the right one depends on your career stage.

A resume template is the visual container - fonts, spacing, columns, section styling.

Choose the format first, then the template. Picking a beautiful template and pouring the wrong format into it is the most common resume mistake we see, and no amount of design fixes it. A fresher using a format designed around ten years of work history ends up with three thin sections and a lot of white space.

Chronological Resume Format

Work experience first, most recent role at the top. This is the default expectation of almost every Indian recruiter and every applicant tracking system. Roughly four out of five job seekers should use it. Use it if you have continuous work experience, or if you're a fresher listing internships and projects in date order.

Functional Resume Format

Skills first, work history reduced to a short list. Use it only if you have a real reason to de-emphasise your timeline: a long career break, a complete industry switch, or a freelance record that doesn't sit neatly into job titles. Be aware that experienced recruiters read a functional resume as a signal that something is being managed, and many parsers handle it poorly because there's no clean employment timeline to extract.

Combination Resume Format

A skills summary at the top, then full chronological experience. The strongest option for mid-to-senior professionals who want a recruiter to see their capability in the first five seconds without losing the credibility of a proper work history.

Resume or CV - Which Do You Need?

The advice you've read a hundred times - never use two columns, the ATS will scramble it - was accurate around 2018 and is now only half true.

A parser converts your file to raw text, then works out the reading order. A naive top-to-bottom, left-to-right pass runs two columns together into one scrambled stream. That failure is real, and it's what the rule was built on. What changed is that the major parsing vendors solved it - column-separator detection is now standard in modern engines.

Where things stand in 2026:

• Modern platforms - Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, and most systems used by tech companies and startups - handle a well-built two-column layout without difficulty.
• Legacy enterprise and government systems - Taleo, and older Workday configurations - remain unreliable with columns. Workday's parser in particular is documented as failing on table-based layouts.
• How the columns are built matters more than whether they exist. Columns made with tables or floating text boxes get misparsed almost everywhere. Native document columns survive on modern parsers.

The practical rule: applying through a large enterprise or PSU portal, use single column. Applying to startups and product companies, two column is fine and reads better to the human who sees it after the parser. If you don't know which system the employer runs, single column passes everywhere and costs you nothing.

Most resume advice is written by people who've never seen the recruiter's side of the screen. Naukri sits on both.

When your resume enters a hiring system, a recruiter doesn't open the PDF first. They see a parsed record - name, current designation, current employer, total experience, location, notice period, skills - and they search and filter on those fields. Your carefully written summary paragraph isn't what gets you shortlisted. The extracted fields are.

Three things follow, and they should shape which template you pick.

Use a real job title

"Growth Ninja" and "Code Wrangler" map to nothing a recruiter searches for. If your company gave you an unusual designation, put the conventional equivalent in brackets after it.

Keep skills as plain text

Skill-rating bars, star ratings and progress circles are images. They carry no text. A parser extracts nothing from them - every one of those graphics is a skill you thought you listed and didn't. Put your skills under a heading that says "Skills", as plain text.

Format your dates consistently

Jan 2023 – Mar 2025 parses cleanly. January 2023 to March 2025 frequently doesn't, and a role that fails to parse becomes a gap in your timeline as far as the system is concerned.

This is where Indian resumes differ most from global templates, and where most advice online is wrong for this market.

Many Indian resumes still list date of birth, marital status, father's name, nationality, languages, sometimes passport number. That convention comes from biodata, not resumes. For private-sector jobs, leave all of it out — it gives recruiters information they aren't allowed to use and are increasingly trained to ignore, and it takes space you need for your work. The exceptions are genuine: government and PSU applications, defence roles, and some campus placement forms ask for these fields explicitly. Provide them when asked, and not otherwise.

Should you put a photo on your resume?\

Not for the overwhelming majority of Indian corporate jobs, and a photo can create bias in either direction. It also takes premium space on page one and parses as nothing. Add one when the employer has asked by name, or for roles where appearance is professionally relevant — cabin crew, hospitality, modelling, acting, on-camera work. If you're applying through Naukri, recruiters already see your profile photo; you don't need it on the document too.

The declaration

"I hereby declare that the above information is true to the best of my knowledge," followed by place and signature. This is carried over from government forms. It's expected on government job applications. On a private-sector resume it consumes two lines and does nothing else.

Biodata is not a resume

1. Bring in your details

If you have a Naukri profile, your education, experience and skills are already there — import them instead of retyping. If you don't, fill the form once and it's saved for next time.

2. Choose a template

Any template on this page. You can switch between them at any point without losing your content, so it's worth trying two or three before you settle.

3. Refine and download

Tighten your bullets, check the layout, and download as PDF or Word.

PDF for most applications. It preserves your layout on every device, and every major applicant tracking system reads a text-based PDF reliably. This is the default.
Word (.docx) when the employer asks for it, when you're applying through an older enterprise or government portal, or when a recruitment consultant needs to add their letterhead - many agencies in India still require an editable file.
Never submit a scanned or image-exported resume. A picture of a resume has no text layer. A parser reads nothing at all, and your application arrives blank.