ATS-friendly resume templates for students, interns, and new graduates, with what to put in each section when you have little formal work history.
The starting point for internships and graduate applications. It sits in the Entry and Student family, keeps education near the top while your degree is still the most recent thing about you, and gives projects the same structural weight as employment entries.
The same early-career stage with a little more to show. Both are single-column minimal layouts recommended for fast applications and clean ATS submissions, which is what you want when you are applying at volume rather than tailoring deeply each time.
From the ATS Core family, and worth switching to once you have a first role behind you. Nothing decorative competes with the text, which makes them the most predictable choice when a posting routes through an enterprise portal.
A single column, standard section headings, real text rather than graphics, and nothing trapped in a table or text box. Those four constraints are what keep extraction clean, and every template here holds to them regardless of which family it belongs to.
Use these pages to keep moving through the same topic cluster instead of bouncing back into generic advice.
An early-career resume has the opposite problem to a senior one. There is not enough employment history to fill the page, so the layout has to give room to projects, coursework, and internships without the result looking padded. The templates below are built for that shape, and the guidance covers the part a template cannot solve: what to actually put in each section when your degree is more recent than your work.
Step 1
A template built for an executive summary will leave you with a half-empty block you feel obliged to fill, and filling it is where early-career resumes go wrong. Start from Brief Minimal or one of the minimal layouts, which expect projects and coursework to be doing the work.
Step 2
A title, a date range, and bullets that say what you built and what happened. Structured that way, a parser reads a project as experience rather than as a loose list, and a human reads it as evidence rather than as filler. This single change does more for an early-career resume than any template choice.
Step 3
Completed a database systems module is filler. Built a normalised schema for a 10,000-row dataset as coursework is a project bullet that happens to be academic, and it survives the same scrutiny a work bullet would. If a module produced something you can describe, describe the thing rather than the module.
Step 4
Export the finished resume as PDF or Word exactly as you would attach it, then run that file through the ATS checker. Graduate schemes route through large applicant tracking systems more often than smaller employers do, so the extraction result is worth confirming rather than assuming.
A minimal template will happily hold a full page, and leaving it sparse reads as a thin application rather than a confident one. Projects, relevant coursework, society roles, and part-time work that shows reliability all belong there if the alternative is whitespace.
A skills section naming twenty tools you used once is easy for an interviewer to dismantle, and it dilutes the four or five you could genuinely discuss. List what you would be comfortable being asked about, and let the rest come up in conversation.
The templates that look most impressive on a portfolio site are usually the ones with sidebars, icons, and skill meters, which are exactly the elements that break parsing. For a graduate scheme routing through an enterprise portal, that formatting choice can cost you the application before anyone reads it.
Advice written for experienced candidates says to lead with work. While you are a student or within a year or two of graduating, your degree is the most relevant and most recent thing you have, and burying it below a part-time job inverts what the reader is looking for.
Next Step
Use the free analyzer to get your ATS score, then move into job match, rewrite, and cover letter workflows when you are ready to tailor applications faster.