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Modern CV templates

Contemporary layouts that look current without shouting. If you are not sure what your industry expects, this is the safest place to start — a modern template reads as considered in almost any sector, and half of the ten here are single-column designs a parser handles without complaint.

10 designs4 free4 rated 5/5 for ATS7 single-column

Every modern template

Contemporary layouts with generous whitespace and a single accent colour. The safest place to start if you are not sure what your industry expects.

Modern ATS

modern · one column

Free

Modern Clean

modern · one column

Free

Modern Compact

modern · two columns

Pro

Modern Corporate

modern · two columns

Pro

Modern Creative

modern · one column

Pro

Modern Elegant

modern · one column

Pro

Modern Executive

modern · two columns

Pro

Modern Minimal

modern · one column

Free

Modern Professional

modern · one column

Free

Modern Tech

modern · one column

Pro

Who these are for

  • Anyone with two to fifteen years of experience applying through an online portal
  • Career changers who need the work history to lead, not the design
  • Applicants in sectors with no strong formatting convention — most of tech, marketing, operations and general business

When to pick something else. If you are applying to a law firm, a university department or a public body, the Classic category is a better fit — those readers expect a conventional document and a contemporary one can read as unserious.

What they have in common

Whitespace does the work

Sections are separated by space and typographic weight rather than boxes and rules, which keeps the page calm at a glance and easy to skim.

One accent colour

A single colour marks headings and rules. Changing it changes the whole document, and the default for each design is chosen to stay legible in greyscale when someone prints your CV.

Restraint over decoration

No icons competing with text, no skill bars presented as evidence. The visual interest comes from the type and the grid.

How modern templates behave in an ATS

Most of the modern designs are single-column and score 5/5 on our parser-safety heuristic, including Modern ATS, which exists specifically for portals. The two-column members — Modern Executive, Modern Corporate, Modern Compact — score 3 or 4 because reading order in a two-column layout depends on how the extractor walks the document. If you are applying through a large employer’s portal rather than emailing a person, pick a one-column design from this category.

The score shown on each template is our own heuristic, based on layout properties known to affect text extraction — column count, graphics, heading structure. It is not a certification, and no builder can test against every system in use. There is a full technical explanation on our ATS guide.

Modern template questions

Yes. Modern Executive and Modern Corporate were designed for people with fifteen or more years of history: the sidebar moves contact details and skills out of the way so the main column carries nothing but the narrative of your career. The perception that senior CVs must look traditional is largely a UK legal and academic convention rather than a general rule.

Start from a modern template

Pick a design, fill in your history, and change your mind as often as you like — switching template never touches your content.

4 of these 10 designs are free on every plan.