Resume Format: The 3 Types, How to Format a Resume, and What the Data Says

A resume format is the skeleton of your resume: which sections it has, what order they come in, and how the page is laid out. There are three standard types, and most formatting advice about them is guesswork. This guide covers all three, when to use each, and how to format the page itself. The difference from most guides: where we make a formatting claim, we back it with what actually happened to 94,338 real applications in Huntr's data.

The short version, if you are in a hurry: pick chronological unless you are changing careers or just starting out, use a clean template in one column or two, keep standard section names, and stop worrying about the rest. The details follow.

Types of Resume Formats

The three types of resume formats are chronological, functional, and combination. Chronological is the most common and the one recruiters know best. Functional is the one they trust least. Combination borrows from both. Here is how each works and who it suits.

Chronological Resume Format

A chronological resume lists your work history in reverse order: your current or most recent job first, then the one before it, and so on. Education follows the same rule, most recent degree first. Read our full guide to the chronological resume for a walkthrough.

The usual order is contact information (name, email, phone, city and state or province), then an optional resume summary or objective, then work experience, skills, education, and any extras such as certifications or volunteer work.

Use it when your work history is steady, you are staying in your field, and your recent titles tell the story you want told. It lets a recruiter see your career trajectory in seconds, which is why it is the default for most people with a few years of experience.

Functional Resume Format

A functional resume leads with skills instead of jobs. The order is usually contact information, summary, a large skills section grouped by theme, then a shorter experience section that may include projects, internships, or volunteer work, then education.

Recruiters are wary of it because it hides the timeline: they cannot see where or when you built each skill, and some assume the format is covering for something. That is a real cost. But it is still the right call in two cases. First, if you have little or no work history yet, it lets you show what you can do rather than where you have not worked. Second, if you are changing careers, say from nursing into tech after a bootcamp, it puts transferable skills in front of a recruiter who would otherwise stop at the unrelated job titles.

If you have a long employment gap, a functional layout can soften it, but a combination format (next) usually does that job better because it keeps some dated history on the page.

Combination Resume Format

A combination resume, sometimes called hybrid, blends the two: a prominent skills section near the top, followed by a full reverse-chronological work history. The order is contact information, summary, skills, experience, education.

It suits people with a few years of experience who also want to foreground specific skills, career changers who have some relevant history, and anyone applying through systems that match on keywords, since the skills section gives you a natural home for the terms in the job posting without forcing them into your bullets. Our resume keyword scanner shows you which terms a posting emphasizes.

The trade-off is space. Two strong sections take room, and combination resumes often run to two pages. That is fine. Huntr's resume length research found two-page resumes reach interviews at the same rate or better than one-page resumes across all career levels, so do not shrink the font or margins to force one page. Cut weak bullets instead.

Which Resume Format Is Best?

Chronological for most people. Combination if you have skills the job posting cares about that your titles do not signal, or if you are a career changer with some relevant history. Functional only if you have almost no relevant work history and need to lead with what you can do.

One honest note on the evidence. Huntr's resume format study measured layout, color, templates, section order, summaries, font size, and dates against interview outcomes, and none of them met its bar for a reliable difference. It did not compare functional against chronological directly, because nearly every resume built in Huntr is chronological or combination. So the advice above on format type comes from how recruiters read resumes, not from our outcome data. The formatting rules below are where the data speaks.

How to Format a Resume: 10 Rules, Ranked by Evidence

For years, resume formatting advice has been passed along without anyone checking it. In 2026 we checked. Huntr's Best Resume Format study matched 94,338 applications from 9,264 job seekers, sent between October 2024 and April 2026, to the exact template, layout, color, font size, and section order of the resume behind each one. 5,422 of those applications reached an interview: 5.75%, or about 1 in 17. Each rule below says whether it comes from that data or from convention.

1. One column or two: either works

Two-column resumes interviewed at 6.2% per application and single-column at 5.7%, a gap that disappears once you compare the same job seeker using both. The sample holds 9,808 two-column applications, so this is not a fluke of a small group. The old warning that applicant tracking systems reject two-column resumes did not hold up on any system we could name: both layouts reached interviews on jobs hosted by Greenhouse, Workday, Lever, Ashby, and Oracle. On Workday-hosted jobs alone, 275 two-column applications produced 25 interviews (9.1%), against 5.0% for single-column. That sample is too small to call two columns better, but it rules out blanket rejection. Pick the layout that fits your content. Read the full breakdown.

2. Use a clean template and stop shopping

All seven of Huntr's templates, from plain single-column to colorful two-column, landed in the same band of interview rates, 5.4% to 7.3%. Aspen had the highest raw rate (7.3%) but only 628 applications behind it; Classic, the default, had 60,516. Once the study accounted for who used each template, no template came out ahead. A recognizable template does not make you look unoriginal; nothing in the data suggests anyone is checking. Choose one you like and spend the saved time on the content. See the template table in the study.

3. Color is fine, in moderation

Colored palettes interviewed at 6.3% against 5.6% for black and white, and that small edge vanished when the same person used both, according to the study. Color neither helps nor hurts. Keep body text dark on a white background for readability and use an accent color for headings or lines if you want one.

4. Keep the font readable and do not shrink it to cram

Our data does not record font family, but every template's default typeface, serif and sans alike, performed the same. Body text between 10.5 and 12 points reads well; headings can run a couple of points larger. Applications with the font shrunk a full point or more interviewed at 5.0%, against 5.8% at the default size. That gap faded when the study compared the same person at both sizes, so shrinking did not cost people interviews, but it gained them nothing either, and a recruiter squinting at nine-point text is not on your side. Shorten weak bullets before you shrink the font. See our guide to resume fonts for specific choices.

5. Margins and spacing: give the page air

This one is convention rather than measured data, because our dataset does not record margins. Half an inch to one inch on all sides, a blank line between sections, and bullets with a little breathing room make a resume scannable. The mistake to avoid is trimming margins to squeeze onto one page, which brings us to length.

6. One page or two: whichever fits without cramming

Huntr's resume length research found two-page resumes perform as well as or better than one-page resumes at every career level. If you have 3 to 9 years of experience, one page often does the job; earlier or later in a career, two pages are normal. Put your name on page two in case the pages are separated. Read the full resume length guide for the breakdown.

7. Use standard section names

Call your sections Work Experience, Education, Skills, Projects, Certifications. Applicant tracking systems map your content into fields by recognizing these headers; a creative rename such as "My Journey" may not map at all. This rule is convention, not a measured result: the study records section types, not the custom labels people give them, so it cannot compare "My Journey" with "Work Experience." This is still the one place to be boring. Our guide to optimizing a resume for applicant tracking systems covers the rest.

8. Experience first, summary optional

Experience-first and education-first resumes interviewed at nearly identical rates (5.8% and 5.4%), so section order is not a filter anyone is applying. Convention still favors leading with your strongest section: experience for almost everyone, education for new graduates. A summary made no reliable difference either way. Resumes without a summary looked better at first glance, but the people who dropped the summary also sent fewer applications; once the study compared people at similar application volumes, the edge disappeared. If you include one, lead it with your single most impressive result rather than adjectives, and keep it to three lines.

9. Send a PDF

Every one of the 94,338 applications in Huntr's study went out as a PDF, and 5.75% reached an interview. There was no Word comparison group, so the study cannot show that PDF beats .docx, and there is no known evidence that PDF does worse. PDF preserves your formatting on any device and any ATS. Send a .docx only when the application explicitly asks for one. Name the file with your name and the role, for example "Jane Doe - Product Manager", so a recruiter can find it in a folder of 200 downloads.

10. Tailor the content, then use keywords the way a human would

Here is the rule that actually moves the number. In Huntr's 2025 Annual Job Search Trends Report, tailored applications converted to interviews, offers, or hires at 5.8%, against 3.73% for untailored ones: about 1.6 times as often. Every formatting change above lives inside one percentage point. Put the posting's key terms where they belong, mostly in your skills section and naturally in your bullets. Skip the old tricks like white-text keywords; a human reads the resume after the software does. Huntr's resume tailor rewrites your base resume against a posting and scores the match; a 70 to 80% match is a good target, not 100%.

Before you write, look at real resume examples for your title. Seeing how people who landed interviews in your field structured their bullets, skills, and summaries beats any rule of thumb, and our examples are rebuilt from anonymized resumes that reached interviews.

Resume Format FAQ

What is the best resume format?

Chronological, for most people. It is the format recruiters read fastest and the one every applicant tracking system handles cleanly. Choose combination if you need a skills section to carry job-posting keywords, and functional only if you have almost no relevant work history.

Is a two-column resume ATS friendly?

Yes. Across 9,808 two-column applications in Huntr's data, there was no interview-rate penalty, and no named ATS, including Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, and Oracle, showed the collapse you would expect if it rejected columns. Read the full breakdown.

Should a resume be one page?

Not necessarily. Two-page resumes performed as well as or better than one-page resumes at every career level in Huntr's research. Use the space your experience needs and never shrink fonts or margins to force one page.

PDF or Word for a resume?

PDF, unless the application specifically asks for a Word file. PDF keeps your formatting intact everywhere.

Does resume format matter?

Format type matters for how a recruiter reads your story. Formatting details (columns, color, template, font size, section order, summary, dates) barely matter at all: across 94,338 real applications, none of them made a reliable difference to interview rates in Huntr's Best Resume Format study. The content and how well it is tailored to the job did.

Conclusion

Pick the resume format that tells your story fastest, format the page cleanly, and put your hours into the words. Huntr's resume builder handles every formatting rule above automatically, in one column or two, with or without color, and tailors the result to each job you track. Sign up free to start.

Sam Wright

Sam Wright is the Head of Career Strategy at Huntr. Drawing on proprietary data from 1.7 million applications, 1 million job postings, 243,000 résumés, and a 1,049-respondent survey, Sam provides actionable, data-driven blueprints to help professionals navigate today's fractured hiring landscape. He has conducted over 900+ free support calls with job seekers, giving him frontline insight into today's job market. His work and insights have been featured in Business Insider, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Seattle Times.

Outside the tech world, Sam is a part-time farmer from a five-generation legacy of organic vegetable farming. He is a passionate advocate for farmland preservation.

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