3 key takeaways
- What a professional resume should look like in 2025—based on recruiter expectations and formatting best practices
- How to make a resume that looks clean, modern, and easy to scan in seconds
- Why smart layout choices—like spacing, simplicity, and section clarity—make for the best-looking resumes
How should a resume look if you want it to stand out—for the right reasons?
A professional resume isn’t about flashy design. It’s about clarity. Hiring professionals are scanning quickly, so your resume needs to look clean, consistent, and easy to read at a glance. That means clear sections, smart spacing, and a layout that makes the most important details pop.
In this guide, we’ll walk through exactly what a good resume looks like today—plus tips, examples, and simple visual tweaks that can help your resume look more polished without spending hours on formatting.
What a resume should look like in 2025
Here’s what hiring managers expect from a modern, professional resume:
- Clear, skimmable layout: Clean spacing, readable fonts, and consistent formatting
- Standard sections: Include all the essentials hiring managers look for:
- Contact Info
- Target Title
- Summary
- Experience
- Education
- Certifications
- Skills
- Optional sections like Volunteer Experience or Projects
- A known format: Choose a structure recruiters recognize—not something overly complex or unfamiliar
- Targeted job title: Aligns with the role you’re applying for
- Simple design elements: One font, one accent color (if any), no graphics
- ATS-friendly structure: No text boxes, unusual formatting, or keyword-stuffing
Why the way your resume looks matters
What recruiters see in the first few seconds can determine whether they keep reading—or move on.
Your resume’s appearance isn’t about making it pretty. It’s about making it clear. A clean, well-structured layout builds trust, highlights key information, and helps hiring teams quickly understand your qualifications.
When your resume is easy to read, that can make the difference in whether or not you get an interview.
Strong design supports faster decisions
Recruiters don’t read every resume in full—at least not at first. They scan for quick signals that show you’re qualified: a clear title, a focused summary, job titles that align with the role.
Strong formatting brings those signals to the surface. It guides the eye, builds trust, and helps your resume get understood faster.
📌 Resume myth: Recruiters only spend a few seconds looking at your resume
That stat about resumes being looked at for only seven seconds? It’s true—but only on the first pass.
If your resume is well-structured and easy to scan, it earns a much longer read during later reviews.
A professional look builds credibility
The way your resume is laid out matters. If it looks cluttered or hard to follow, it can signal a lack of attention to detail—even if your experience is strong.
A clean, consistent layout makes your resume easier to trust and easier to read. It keeps the focus where it should be: on your qualifications.
The basics of a good-looking resume
Your resume doesn’t need graphic elements or flashy formatting. But it does need to look clean, easy to follow, and professional. Here are basics to consider for how a resume should look.
1. Follow a well-known format
A good-looking resume should follow a format that recruiters recognize:
- Chronological resume format
- Functional resume format
- Combination resume format
Reverse-chronological is still the most widely accepted format in 2025, especially for roles that value a clear work history. If you're unsure which to use, chronological is the safest bet for most professionals.
2. Consider length
You don’t need to cram your entire career onto one page. In fact, most mid- to senior-level professionals need a second page or more to fully cover relevant experience.
What matters isn’t the page count—it’s what’s on it.
Career Expert Dave Fano has spent over 20 years hiring and reviewing resumes. His take on resumes in 2025?
3. Choose a consistent font and size
There’s no need to get fancy here. Choose a professional, easy-to-read resume font like Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, or Verdana, and use it throughout your resume.
Keep your font zie consistent:
- 10–12 pt for body text
- 14–16 pt for section headers
- A slightly larger size for your name is fine (think 18–22 pt)
You can use bolding or all caps for emphasis but use them intentionally. Overdoing it can make your content harder to scan—not easier.
4. Use white space strategically
White space plays a big role in how your resume feels. If everything is packed too tightly together, it can be visually overwhelming, even if the content is great.
Stick with standard resume margins (1/2 –1 inch), and make sure to use good resume spacing between each section and bullet. Clear visual breaks help guide the reader’s eye and make it easier to process what you’re sharing.
5. Make your headings easy to spot
Section headers do more than organize your content—they help prospective employers find what they’re looking for fast. Simple formatting choices (like bold text, a slightly larger size, or extra spacing above the heading) go a long way.
Stick with standard section labels (like Work Experience, Skills, and Education), and avoid changing the order too much unless you have a strategic reason. A familiar structure helps recruiters stay focused on the content—not the layout.
What does a good resume look like?
A good resume is clean, skimmable, and tailored to the job description. The example below shows a layout that uses consistent formatting, clear section headings, and strong visual hierarchy—so the experience stands out at a glance.
Best looking resume example
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Why this great looking resume works:
This resume isn’t flashy—and that’s the point.
It uses a professional resume layout and is structured to highlight the most important details first:
- Target title
- Concise professional summary
- Work experience
- Relevant skills
Everything is also aligned, easy to scan, and clearly labeled. The font is readable, the spacing is intentional, and the layout leaves room between sections without wasting valuable resume space.
Modern resume tips for a clean, polished look
In 2025, your resume isn’t just read by a person—it might be processed by digital systems, too. From applicant tracking systems (ATS) to browser-based viewers, formatting needs to be clean and structured enough to work across both.
Below are a few resume layout tweaks that can help your resume feel more polished, more professional, and easier to read—without relying on gimmicks.
Align dates and locations
Aligning your dates and locations creates a clear break between your professional history and your supporting info, which helps both humans and machines process your experience faster.
Why it works:
- Gives structure to your content without adding visual clutter
- Prevents long job titles from running into locations or timelines
- Creates a cleaner reading flow, especially on screens
Add a target title
A target title goes right beneath your resume header. It's a large part of how your resume gets identified as relevant. Hiring managers need to be able to see this on the first pass.
In addition, most ATS software allows recruiters to search by job title. If your resume doesn’t clearly match the role they’re hiring for, it may never surface in their search results.
Include subtle dividers between sections
To guide the reader through your layout, use subtle dividers between major sections. This can be as simple as extra spacing or a thin horizontal line. Both create visual breaks that improve readability without calling attention to themselves.
Use color intentionally
Color can help your resume stand out—but only when it’s used strategically. The goal isn’t to impress with style—it’s to support readability with subtle resume accents.
Stick to:
- One resume color as an accent (navy, dark green, dark gray, deep mustard, etc.)
- Section headings, horizontal lines, or your name—not body text
- Readable contrast between text and background
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Pro Tip: Teal’s resume templates are already optimized for visual clarity—clean lines, smart spacing, and subtle use of color are built in. No need to guess what works.
What to avoid in a professional-looking resume
A professional resume is clean, readable, and easy to follow. But sometimes, in an attempt to stand out, job seekers overdo it with layout elements that hurt more than they help.
This section covers a few common choices to avoid that can make your resume feel cluttered or unpolished—even if the content is strong.
Too much going on
A cluttered resume can make even great experience hard to see. Skip anything that adds noise instead of clarity:
- More than one resume font
- Decorative borders, icons, or logos
- Layouts that look like flyers or brochures
These elements pull focus from your qualifications and can confuse automated applicant tracking systems. Clean and simple isn’t boring—it’s effective.
Overcrowded or cramped
When you remove all the white space from your resume—shrinking the font, eliminating spacing between key achievements, cramming two pages into one—you’re not saving space. You’re making your resume harder to read.
Instead of tightening everything to fit, focus on prioritizing what belongs.
Visual tricks or hacks
You don’t need graphics, boxes, or clever layout hacks to make your resume stand out. In fact, most of those resume design mistakes just get in the way—especially when ATS software can’t parse them correctly.
Some red flags to avoid:
- Tables that collapse in upload fields
- Hidden white text packed with keywords
- Irregular alignment that throws off visual flow
- Icons or shapes used to separate sections
Simple formatting isn’t basic—it’s strategic. Keep the focus on your experience, not your layout.
What a good resume looks like - final checklist
A professional resume should be easy to scan, visually balanced, and aligned to the role. Use this chart to make sure your layout supports clarity.
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Create the best-looking resume today
You don't need to be a certified professional resume writer to create a clean, functional resume that's clear and easy to read.
A professional-looking resume comes down to:
- Simple, consistent formatting
- Strong visual hierarchy
- Clear section labels and spacing
- Readable fonts and sizing
- Layout choices that support your content
And if you’d rather not start from scratch?
Teal’s pre-built resume templates follow all the visual best practices for you—so you can skip the formatting guesswork and focus on writing content that gets results.
