I will say the unpopular part up front: for most people, the resume format debate is not close. Reverse-chronological — most recent job first, working backward — is the right default, and the templates trying to differentiate themselves with columns, icons, and photo headers are actively working against the people using them. Not because those templates look bad. Because of what they signal and how they get read.
Why reverse-chronological wins by default
Recruiters and ATS parsers are both calibrated on the same format, because it has been the standard for decades. A recruiter scanning a resume in the six to eight seconds they typically give a first pass knows exactly where to look for your current title, your last employer, and your tenure, because that information is always in the same place. A parser has the same advantage — it is built and tested against the format everyone actually uses.
Functional or skills-based formats — the ones that lead with a big skills summary and bury or omit the chronological work history — try to solve a real problem (a messy or thin job history) but tend to create a worse one. Recruiters have seen enough of them to associate the format itself with people hiding something: a gap, a string of short stints, a demotion, a long absence. Even when that is not true for you, the format carries that reputation, and it costs you the benefit of the doubt before anyone has read a single bullet.
The real exceptions
There are two situations where breaking from a pure chronological format is actually warranted, and both call for a hybrid — a short skills or qualifications summary up top, followed by a full, honest chronological history below it, not instead of it.
- Career changers, where your most recent job title does not obviously map to the role you are applying for and a hiring manager would otherwise not make the connection without help. We cover this case in detail in how to write a resume for a career change.
- People with a genuinely relevant skill set that job titles alone do not convey — someone who has done product-management-shaped work under a title like "Operations Coordinator," for instance, where the titles undersell what actually happened.
Outside of those two cases, keep the chronological backbone. A hybrid summary is a lead-in, not a replacement.
Why two-column and heavily designed templates keep failing parsers
This is the part that is not a matter of opinion — it is how parsing software actually works. Most resume parsers read a document the way a scanner does: left to right, top to bottom, in a single pass. A one-column resume matches that reading order naturally. A two-column resume does not.
Here is concretely what goes wrong. Say the left column has your job titles and company names, stacked top to bottom, and the right column has the matching dates, also stacked top to bottom. A parser that reads straight across the page, line by line, does not know those are two separate columns — it reads "Senior Analyst, Regional Bank Corp" from the left column on one line, then continues rightward into "2019–2021" from a completely different row in the right column, because that text happens to sit at the same vertical position. The output the system actually scores might read as if you held the title from row one for the dates from row three. Your actual work history gets reassembled in the wrong order, or gets dropped entirely because the parser cannot make sense of it. Icons used in place of section headers, text embedded inside graphic elements, and photo headers create their own version of the same failure — the parser either garbles the order or cannot read the content at all.
None of this shows up when you look at the resume yourself, because you are looking at the designed, rendered version. The scrambling happens in the machine-readable text underneath it, which is exactly the part that determines whether you clear an automated screen.
What a safe format actually looks like
- Single column, top to bottom, no side-by-side sections.
- Standard system fonts — Arial, Calibri, Georgia. Plain, but reliable. This is not the place to express personality through typography.
- Clear, conventional section headers: "Work Experience," "Education," "Skills." Not "My Journey" or anything invented for style.
- No text boxes, tables, or content placed inside a header or footer — some parsers skip headers and footers entirely, so anything that needs to be read should live in the main body.
For a deeper walkthrough of exactly what makes a template safe to parse, including a test you can run on any resume in under a minute, see what actually makes a resume template ATS-friendly.
One page or two?
Briefly, because it deserves its own answer: this depends heavily on how many years of relevant experience you actually have, and treating "one page" as an inflexible rule causes people early in their career to pad content and people ten years in to cut things that matter. We break this down by career stage in how long should a resume be.
Format is not where you should be spending your creative energy. Spend it on the content inside a boring, reliable structure — that is what actually gets read, by a machine and by the person who opens the file after it.