A readable CV layout: margins, fonts, spacing and columns

A recruiter does not read your CV: they scan it, top to bottom, looking for your headline, your latest job and whatever matches the ad. The layout decides what they find first. Screening software, for its part, does not see the page: it reads the text in the order it is stored. A good layout serves both. Here are its rules, what the robots do with columns and banners, and what the site measures and fixes in your PDF.

A hierarchy you can see at a glance

Three levels are enough: your name, the section headings, the text. Each stands out from the next through size or bold, never through a new font. In each job, the job title stands out (in bold), the employer and dates come straight after, always in the same place, and the achievement lines follow. The eye learns the pattern on the first job and applies it to the rest: that is what makes a CV quick to read.

• Two sizes for the body of the CV: one for section headings, one for text. Your name can be larger; everything else follows one of the two.
• Bold to signpost, not to emphasise: job titles, section headings. One bold word per line of text, and nothing stands out any more.
• No capitals across a whole line of text: they are slower to read. Keep them, at most, for short headings.

White space: margins and breathing room

White space is not wasted space: it is what separates the blocks. Keep margins equal on all sides, and wide enough that nothing gets cut off when printed. Leave more space between two sections than between two jobs, and more between two jobs than between two lines. If you have to trim the margins to make everything fit, the problem is the text, not the page: our guide to one-page CVs says what to cut.

One readable typeface

Choose a common font, installed on every computer, sans-serif for a modern look or serif for a more classic one, and keep it from your name down to the last line. Handwriting, novelty or very thin fonts tire the eye and print badly. Also avoid letters spaced out by hand (“E X P E R I E N C E”): software may read them as separate letters and stop recognising the section.

Align everything

• Text aligned left, not justified: justification opens up gaps between words on short lines.
• Dates in the same column from one job to the next, all on the right or all under the job title.
• The same bullets, the same indent throughout; a bullet that sticks out of line is more noticeable than a typo.

Columns and banners: handle with care

A coloured sidebar or a banner across the top give a CV character, and a human reads them easily. Screening software finds them harder: our “Simple layout” criterion puts it this way: “Multiple columns, tables and text boxes scramble the robot's reading order.” Three precautions make these layouts safe:

1. The essentials in the main column: experience and education. The sidebar holds what reads in fragments: languages, skills, tools.
2. Contact details as text, in the body of the CV: “Email and phone written as text in the body of the CV (not in an image or a header).” A banner drawn on the page, with your name and email as text, is fine; the same banner exported as an image, or placed in Word's header, loses both.
3. A single-column version for large companies' online forms, if your template is busy. The details are in our guides to Canva CVs and to ATS screening robots.

Colours and icons: an accent, not decoration

A single accent colour, repeated on headings, the banner or the sidebar, is enough to give the CV an identity. Body text stays dark on a light background: pale grey on white is hard to read on screen and vanishes in print. Icons (phone, email, location) are fine next to the text, never instead of it, and skill bars or rating stars say nothing: “Gauges, icons and logos are invisible to the robot: what they say is lost.” Write the level in words.

Uneven spacing, measured and realigned

After a few touch-ups, a CV keeps traces: a wider gap between two jobs, a misaligned bullet, a section stuck to the previous one. On Fix the spacing, the site measures those spaces in your PDF, with no AI: for each kind of gap (heading to text, bullet to bullet), it works out the document's usual gap and realigns those that stray from it. Drawn bullets follow their text; backgrounds, lines and images stay where they are. You can also choose “More spacious” or “Tighter”, or ask for “more space before Education”: the AI only picks the place and the direction, and the distances come from the site's scale.

When the text no longer fits: redraw it

An added job or a longer translation does not always fit in the original space. The site then measures the look of your PDF, with no AI: coloured sidebar or banner, colours of the text, headings and name, sizes, font family, photo. Then the AI sorts your text into sections, copied word for word, and the site redraws your CV in that look: that is the rebuild in the same look. The result is close to the original, not identical: same column, same colours, same photo, but a font from the same family rather than yours to the letter. Then, in “My structure”, you can change the arrangement, colour or font and move your sections around (see Update your CV).

The glance test

Before sending it, display your whole CV on screen, step back and squint. You should see three things without reading: your name, the role you are after, and where your experience starts. If your eye lands first on a block of colour, an icon or a dense chunk of text, that is where to rework it.