Recruiter-Approved Resume Template (Free) with Careers with Apurva

Your resume is probably fine. The format is what's killing it.

I've recruited for 14 years and hired 1000+ people at Gartner, MongoDB and SoftwareOne. On a normal day I opened 150–200 resumes and gave each one about six seconds.

In those six seconds I'm not reading. I'm scanning for four things — your title, your last two companies, how long you stayed, and whether your dates add up. If I can't find them fast, you don't move forward. Most people who get rejected never made it to the reading.

Then it happened to me. Nine months job hunting after Gartner, hearing nothing back. I finally uploaded my own resume into an ATS and saw my job titles sitting in the wrong fields and two roles merged into one, because they were inside a table.

Nobody was rejecting me. Nobody was seeing me.

I rebuilt it plain and boring. Four offers in the six weeks after. This is that template.

A Word file you open and type into. About six minutes.

→ Single column. No tables, columns, photos or icons — the five things that quietly scramble your resume before a human opens it → Real Word heading styles and standard fonts, so the software reads your titles correctly → A career break section that states the gap and moves on. No apology, no stretched dates — those get verified at offer stage → Notes beside each field on what a recruiter is actually looking for on that line → A filled-in example with a nine-month gap in it, so you can see what finished looks like

The template is on page two. I put it first on purpose. Everything after it is optional.

Free. Download it, use it, send it to a friend who's been quietly struggling.