Simple resume template: a clean layout, a full example and how to fill it in

Example resume

Example

Danielle Brooks

Administrative Assistant, office operations and scheduling

danielle.brooks@example.com · (614) 555-0147 · Columbus, OH

Summary

Administrative assistant with 5 years of experience supporting managers in a busy medical practice and a property management office. Calendar management, vendor invoices, office supplies and front desk coverage in Microsoft 365. Looking for an administrative role with more responsibility for office operations.

Experience

Administrative Assistant

Feb 2023 - Present

Scioto Valley Family Practice · Columbus, OH · Full-time

• Manage the calendars of 3 physicians and the practice manager, about 40 meetings and calls a week.
• Process 120 vendor invoices a month and reconcile them with purchase orders before payment.
• Moved supply ordering to a shared spreadsheet with reorder levels, ending last-minute rush orders.
• Cover the front desk at lunch and during peak hours, checking in up to 25 patients an hour.

Office Assistant

Jun 2021 - Jan 2023

Brightline Property Management · Westerville, OH · Full-time

• Answered tenant calls and emails for 14 residential buildings and logged maintenance requests.
• Prepared lease packets and tracked signatures for about 30 move-ins a month.
• Kept the vendor contact list and insurance certificates up to date.

Education

Associate of Applied Science, Business Management

Aug 2019 - May 2021

Columbus State Community College · Columbus, OH

Skills

• Calendar and travel management
• Microsoft 365: Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams
• Accounts payable basics
• Front desk and phone etiquette
• Data entry, 60 words per minute
• Office supply and vendor management

Languages

• English native speaker

Interests

Volunteer at a neighborhood food pantry

Danielle has five years of office experience and applies for administrative roles in Columbus. Her resume uses the Slate template, the plainest in Kandiq's Simple family: no rules, no capitals, headings that stand out by weight alone. Nothing on the page competes with what she did.

What this simple resume does well, and what you can copy:

• the job she wants is written under her name, so a recruiter knows in one second what she's applying for;
• the summary says how many years, in what kind of office, and what she's looking for next;
• every bullet has a number: 3 physicians, 120 invoices a month, 25 patients an hour;
• there's no photo, no date of birth and no full street address, as expected on a US resume.

A simple resume template is a layout that stays out of the way. It uses one column, a classic font, standard section headings, one accent color at most, and enough white space to separate each part. No sidebars, no icons, no skill bars, no photo. You may also see it called a basic resume template, a minimalist resume or a plain resume: the idea is the same.

The features that make a resume template simple:

• One column read from top to bottom, with your most recent job first.
• A small header with your name, target job title and contact details, so the page goes to your experience.
• Plain headings: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills.
• One color, often black, gray or navy, used only for headings or rules.
• Consistent spacing between sections and between jobs.

Almost always. A simple resume is the format hiring managers expect, and the easiest to read for the software that receives online applications. It's the best pick when:

• you apply online through a company career site, Indeed or LinkedIn, where an applicant tracking system reads your file first;
• you target a traditional field: healthcare, finance, accounting, law, government, education, administration;
• you have a lot to say: a long career fits better in a calm layout than in a designed one;
• you have little to say: for a first job, a simple layout makes a short resume look intentional, not empty;
• you don't know who will read it: nobody is put off by a clean, simple resume.

In design, marketing or a startup, you can add more color with a modern template. The content rules below don't change.

In the Kandiq gallery, the simplest layouts are in the Simple tab. All five are single-column, and none has a caveat for automated reading. Two Compact templates follow the same rules with tighter spacing.

Pill shows skills as tags, so skill levels are no longer written out: if you want to say "advanced" or "intermediate", pick another template. Each template can then be adjusted: eight accent colors or a custom one, font, text size, line spacing, margins and section order. Switching templates never touches your content, so you can compare Ink and Firm on your own resume before deciding.

1. Header: full name, the job title you want, city and state, phone, a professional email, and your LinkedIn URL. No street address, date of birth or photo.
2. Summary: two or three sentences: your title, years of experience, strongest skills and what you're looking for. Our resume summary examples show how by field.
3. Experience: most recent job first. Job title, employer, city and state, start and end month, then three to five bullets.
4. Education: degree, school, city and graduation year. Recent graduates put it above experience.
5. Skills: six to ten hard and soft skills that match the job posting. See our skills for your resume guide.

Optional sections keep their standard names: Certifications, Technical Skills, Languages, Interests. You don't need "References available upon request" on a simple resume; our guide to references on a resume explains what to do instead.

1. Read the job posting first and underline the job title, tools and skills it repeats.
2. Write your header with the job title from the posting under your name.
3. List your jobs from the most recent, with complete dates, before writing any bullets.
4. Write three to five bullets per job, each starting with a verb and ending with a result.
5. Write the summary last: once your experience is down, it's easy to sum up in three sentences.
6. Fill the skills section with what the posting asks for and your bullets prove.
7. Proofread on paper or out loud, then save as a PDF unless the posting asks for Word.

• Font: one font for the whole page, 10 to 12 points for the body. Kandiq's Simple templates set it between 10.5 and 10.8 points.
• Margins: wide enough to print cleanly. A page crammed to the edges no longer looks simple.
• Length: one page early in your career, two at most later on. Our guide on how long a resume should be has the details. In Kandiq, "Auto-fit" tightens spacing to hit one or two pages and tells you when there's too much to stay readable.
• Bullets: plain round bullets, all ending the same way, with or without a period.
• Dates: one format everywhere, month and year, aligned the same way for every job.
• Bold: for job titles, not for random words inside a sentence.

A simple layout hides nothing, so weak content shows. The most common mistake is listing duties instead of results.

• An objective instead of a summary: "Seeking a challenging position" says nothing a recruiter can use.
• An unprofessional email address: use one with your name.
• Inconsistent formatting: dates in two formats, bullets of three kinds.
• Typos: on a simple resume, they're the first thing that stands out.

A simple resume template is almost always ATS-friendly too, as long as it doesn't hide text in tables or text boxes. But not every ATS-friendly template looks simple. A modern layout with a colored header block or tinted headings can parse just as well, because the color is a background, not an image. What both share: one column for your work history, standard headings, real text. If you apply mostly online and want a bit more color, see our page on the ATS-friendly resume template.

Send a PDF unless the posting asks for something else: it looks the same on every computer and keeps your text selectable. A Word file is useful when a staffing agency wants to edit your resume, or when you want to change something outside the editor.

Kandiq downloads your resume as a PDF identical to the preview, or as a Word (.docx) file in a simple one-column layout that keeps your content, section order and accent color but isn't a copy of the template's look. Writing, editing and checking your resume cost nothing; downloads are part of the subscription, and you see the finished resume before paying anything.

On a US resume, leave out the photo: the EEOC says employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. Kandiq's Simple templates have no photo by default.