Sidebar Slate CV Template
Tinted left column for contact and skills, experience on the right.
Layout
A true two-column page. The left column, roughly a third of the width, has a light tint of your colour and holds your name, headline, contact details, skills and certifications, with skills split into a one-per-line list. The wider right column carries the summary, work experience, education and any additional section. Right-column headings are coloured capitals followed by a thin grey line that runs to the edge.
How ATS software reads it
Two columns carry more parsing risk than one. The code places the sidebar first in the text order, so a modern parser should read name, contact and skills, then the main column. Some older systems read straight across the page instead, which can mix sidebar lines into your job history. The text is real and selectable and the tint has no effect on parsing. Splitting skills into separate lines can help keyword matching, but test by pasting the PDF text into a plain document.
Best for
- Experienced professionals with a long skills list
- IT, data and engineering roles with many tools to list
- Applications sent directly to a recruiter or hiring manager by email
- People who want contact details and skills visible at a glance
If you are applying mainly through large online portals, especially ones that may run older parsing software, a single-column template is the lower-risk choice.
Tips for this template
- Separate skills with commas or new lines; the template turns each one into its own list line in the sidebar.
- Keep certification names to one line each, as the narrow column will wrap long titles into several lines.
- Copy all the text from the downloaded PDF into a plain text editor; if your job history reads in order, most parsers will cope too.
CV examples that use this template
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