Most free CV templates are designed by graphic designers to look striking in a portfolio. They use two columns, sidebars, icons and skill rating bars, and they are among the worst possible choices for an application that will be read by software first. What you want is an ATS compliant CV template built for the UK market that parses correctly every time, and which a human still finds easy to read.
Below is that structure in full, with the reasoning for each decision, so you can build it in Word, Google Docs or Pages in about fifteen minutes. There is nothing to download and no email to hand over.
The Five Rules the Structure Follows
Before the template itself, the principles. Nearly every parsing failure traces back to breaking one of these.
- One column, top to bottom. Text extraction reads in a linear order. Two columns and sidebars can interleave into nonsense, so a job title ends up attached to the wrong employer.
- No tables, text boxes, headers or footers. Content in a table cell or a text box is frequently missed entirely. Contact details placed in a header are the classic version of this, and they vanish surprisingly often.
- Standard section headings. Use the conventional words. Creativity in a heading costs you a correctly identified section.
- One date format everywhere. Inconsistent formats create phantom gaps and overlapping roles.
- Real text, not an image. If you cannot select and copy the text from your saved file, neither can the parser.
The Template
1. Name and Contact Details
Plain text at the very top of the body, not in a document header.
Your name on one line as a normal line of text. Then, on one or two lines: city and county, mobile number, email address, LinkedIn URL in full. Include your right-to-work status only if it is genuinely relevant to the role.
Leave out your full postal address, date of birth, nationality, marital status and photograph. None help, and postcode in particular can act as a proxy for background in ways that do you no favours.
2. Professional Summary, Three Lines, No Adjectives
Heading: Professional Summary (or Profile).
Three sentences maximum, and no character adjectives. Delete "dynamic", "passionate", "hard-working", "results-driven" and "team player" on sight. They occupy the most valuable space on the page and communicate nothing.
Say instead: what you do, at what level, in what domain, with one concrete anchor. For example: "Registered nurse with six years in acute medicine, currently at band 6 with responsibility for a 28-bed ward caseload and practice assessor duties for two student cohorts."
3. Key Skills, Short, and Only What You Go on to Prove
Heading: Key Skills.
Six to ten items, comma-separated or in a simple bulleted list. Not a table. Not rating bars, a graphic showing "Python 4/5" is unreadable to a parser and meaningless to a human.
The discipline that matters: only list things the rest of your CV demonstrates. A skills section promising more than the body delivers is the pattern modern screening discounts most.
4. Professional Experience, the Section That Decides It
Heading: Professional Experience (or Work Experience). Reverse chronological order.
For each role, four lines of structure:
- Job Title on its own line.
- Employer, City on the next line.
- Mon YYYY, Mon YYYY on the next line, or Mon YYYY, Present.
- Then three to six plain bullet points.
Keeping title, employer and dates on separate lines is deliberate. Cramming them onto one line with pipes or tabs is where parsers most often mis-assign which title belongs to which employer.
For the bullets, lead with the action and attach the specifics. The pattern that performs is: what you did, in what context, at what scale, with what result. One number per bullet, wherever a number honestly exists.
Give your most recent and most relevant roles the most space. A role from twelve years ago needs one line, not six.
5. Education and Qualifications
Heading: Education and Qualifications. Reverse chronological.
Qualification, institution, year completed. Where a professional registration or chartership matters to the role, give it its own line and state the awarding body and your registration number if you have one. Be precise about status: "working towards" and "awarded" are different claims, and blurring them is the fastest way to lose trust at verification stage.
6. Optional Closing Sections
Only if they carry weight for this role: Certifications, Professional Development, Publications, Volunteering, Languages. Skip hobbies unless genuinely relevant.
Do not include a references section. "References available on request" is assumed and wastes a line.
Formatting Specifics
- Font: any common one, Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Roman. 10-12pt body.
- Bullets: the standard round bullet. Not arrows, ticks, emoji or custom glyphs, which sometimes extract as junk characters.
- Colour: black text. One restrained accent colour on headings is fine.
- Margins: 1.5cm to 2.5cm.
- Length: two pages is the UK norm; academic and clinical CVs run longer legitimately.
- File name: Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf.
- File type: a text-based PDF unless the employer asks for .docx. Both parse well.
The Thirty-Second Test
Save your finished CV, open the PDF, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor.
What you see is approximately what the screening system sees. If your name is missing, your job titles have merged into your employers, your dates have scattered or whole sections have vanished, you have found your problem, and it was never the content.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a PDF or Word Document Better for ATS?
Both parse reliably when the layout is simple. A text-based PDF has the advantage of preserving your formatting everywhere. What breaks parsing is structure, tables, columns, text boxes, images, not the file extension. If the employer names a format, follow it.
Do I Need a Different CV for Every Application?
You need the same structure with a re-pointed top third. Keep the layout fixed and adjust the summary, the key skills and the emphasis in your two most recent roles to match what this advert actually asks for. Rewriting from scratch each time is unnecessary.
Will a Plain CV Look Boring Next to Designed Ones?
A UK recruiter reads a plain, well-evidenced CV as professional. Heavy design mainly signals design software familiarity, which is only relevant if you are applying for design work, and even then, the portfolio carries that, not the CV.
Should I Include a Skills Bar Chart or Rating out of Five?
No. It is invisible to a parser and unhelpful to a human, because your self-assigned four out of five means nothing without a reference point. Use the space to evidence the skill instead.
How Do I Handle an Employment Gap in This Structure?
Account for it briefly and factually in the experience section, study, caring responsibilities, travel, illness, redundancy, a period of job seeking. Unexplained gaps invite speculation, and a one-line explanation closes it down. Never fabricate dates to cover one.
Build It Once
Set this up properly a single time and you will use it for years. The structure is deliberately dull because dull parses correctly, and the cleverness belongs in the content rather than the layout.
Once the structure is out of the way, spend your effort on the part that actually decides outcomes: making your three or four most important claims properly evidenced, with context, scale and a result. CVSense scores the substance behind a claim rather than counting keywords, which means a plain CV with real specifics beats a beautiful one full of adjectives.
Sources
National Careers Service. CV Sections and Advice.
https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/careers-advice/cv-sections
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
https://www.cipd.org/uk/
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