Straight answer: open a blank document, set 0.7 to 1 inch margins, pick one clean font at 10 to 11 point, and build five sections in this order: header, summary, experience, education, skills. Skip tables, text boxes, and columns because they confuse the software that reads your resume before a human ever does. The whole thing should take you about 90 minutes if you have your work history sorted first.
Why bother building from scratch instead of grabbing a template
I get asked this constantly. If Word ships with dozens of resume templates already, why sit there building one from a blank page? Two reasons, and one of them nobody likes hearing.
The first reason is control. When you build your own layout, you know exactly what’s in every line of that document, including the hidden formatting that templates love to bury. The second reason is the uncomfortable one: a lot of Word’s built in resume templates are riddled with tables, text boxes, and multi column layouts that look sharp on screen and then get mangled or rejected by applicant tracking systems. I’ve seen a strong candidate, a finance manager with eleven years of experience, get zero replies from 40 applications before we worked out her downloaded template had her entire work history sitting inside a text box that the parsing software simply couldn’t read. Her actual resume looked empty to the system. She wasn’t being ignored for being underqualified. She was invisible.
So building from scratch isn’t about being a purist. It’s about knowing what’s under the bonnet.
What to gather before you open Word
Don’t open Word yet. Sit with a blank notes document or a piece of paper first and pull together:
- Job titles, company names, locations, and exact start and end months for the last 10 to 15 years
- Three to five bullet points per role, each one built around a number or a result, not a duty
- Your qualifications, with grades or classifications if you’re under five years into your career
- A list of 12 to 15 skills that appear in the job adverts you’re targeting
- A phone number, one email address, your city, and your LinkedIn URL
This step is the one most people skip and it’s why they end up staring at a blank Word document for 40 minutes rewriting the same sentence. Get the raw content sorted first. Formatting is the easy part.
Step 1: set up your document
Open Word, choose a blank document (not a template, not a resume wizard), and do these five things before you type a single word:
- Go to Layout and set margins to 0.7 inch on all sides. One inch is fine too if your content is short, but 0.7 buys you more room without looking cramped
- Pick a font: Calibri, Arial, Georgia, or Garamond. Avoid Times New Roman, it screams 2009, and avoid anything decorative
- Set body text to 10.5 or 11 point and your name at the top to 18 or 20 point, bold
- Set line spacing to single or 1.08, and paragraph spacing to add a small gap after each entry (Layout, then Spacing, then set “After” to 6pt)
- Turn off AutoFormat’s automatic bullet styling if you want plain, consistent bullets (File, Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then untick the automatic bulleted lists box)
One page for anything under 10 years of experience. Two pages if you’ve got 15-plus years worth of relevant roles. Nobody in HR is impressed by a three page resume, they’re annoyed by it.
Step 2: build the header
Type your name, then on the line below it add your phone number, email, city, and LinkedIn URL, separated by a vertical bar or a small dot. No home address, no date of birth, no photo (unless you’re applying somewhere in continental Europe where photos are still expected). Left align this. Centred headers look nice but centred text is harder for some parsing software to read cleanly, and it’s slightly less scannable for a busy recruiter’s eye, which naturally lands top left first.
Step 3: write the summary
Three lines, no more. Who you are, what you’ve done, what you’re aiming for next. Something like: “Marketing manager with 8 years’ experience running lead generation campaigns for B2B software companies. Grew organic pipeline by 34% at a 60 person SaaS firm in 2025. Looking to bring that same approach to a Series B startup.” Specific, not “results driven team player with excellent communication skills.” That phrase means nothing and every recruiter has read it 500 times this month.
Step 4: build the experience section
Bold the company name, italicise or plain-text the job title, and put the dates on the right using a right tab stop, not the space bar. This is where a lot of “from scratch” builds fall apart because people use spaces to push the date to the right margin, and it looks fine until the resume gets opened on a different machine and every date shifts. Instead:
- Type the job title, then press Tab
- Go to the ruler at the top of the page and click once at the far right edge to set a right tab stop
- Type the date range after your tab, it will now snap neatly to the right margin every time
Under each role, three to five bullets, each one starting with a strong verb (led, cut, built, grew, negotiated) and ending with a number wherever you possibly can. “Managed social media” is a duty. “Grew Instagram following from 2,000 to 19,000 in 14 months, driving a 22% lift in inbound enquiries” is proof.
Step 5: education and skills
Keep education short unless you’re a fresher. Degree, institution, year, classification if it’s a 2:1 or above. If you’re newer to the workforce with limited paid experience, this section carries more weight, and it’s worth looking at how resume templates built specifically for candidates with no experience handle the balance between education, projects, and transferable skills, because the structure differs from a standard experienced hire layout.
For skills, list them in a simple comma separated line or a two column list using tab stops, not a table. Match the wording to the job description. If the advert says “stakeholder management,” don’t write “worked with stakeholders,” write “stakeholder management.” ATS software matches phrases, not vibes.
The Word features that quietly wreck your resume
Here’s the part that most guides on this topic gloss over. Word gives you tools that make a resume look brilliant and read terribly to a machine. Avoid these when you’re building from scratch:
- Tables: some ATS platforms read them fine, plenty don’t, and you have no way of knowing which one a given employer uses
- Text boxes: content inside a text box is sometimes skipped entirely by parsing software, which is exactly what happened to my finance manager client
- Columns: a two column layout can get read left to right across both columns instead of down each one, scrambling your sentences into nonsense
- Headers and footers: some systems don’t scan them at all, so your name and contact details vanish if you’ve tucked them into the page header
- Icons and graphics: a little phone icon next to your number looks tidy to a human and is invisible to a bot
This is the uncomfortable truth nobody selling you a beautiful template wants to say out loud: the prettiest resumes are often the ones that never get read by a human at all, because they never made it past the software. Plain, well organised, and slightly boring beats clever and unreadable, every single time you’re applying through an online portal.
Step 6: proof it the right way
Read it backwards, bullet by bullet, starting from the bottom. It breaks the pattern your brain falls into when reading top to bottom, and that’s how typos hide. Then get one other person to read it, ideally someone who has hired for a similar role, because they’ll spot a vague bullet point faster than they’ll spot a spelling mistake.
Step 7: save and export correctly
Save the working file as a.docx so you can edit it later. When you send it, export to PDF (File, Export, Create PDF/XPS) unless the job application explicitly asks for a Word document, which some older corporate portals still do. PDF locks your formatting so it looks identical on every machine. Name the file: FirstnameLastname-Resume.pdf, not “resume final v3 USE THIS ONE.pdf.” Recruiters see that file name and it tells them something about your attention to detail before they’ve read a word.
A real example from my own kitchen table
A few years back my youngest was applying for her first marketing assistant role and insisted on building her resume from a completely blank Word document because she didn’t trust any of the templates she’d found online. I sat with her for about an hour. We stripped out three decorative dividers, moved her dates from centred to right-tabbed, and cut her “objective statement” down from six lines to two. She sent out 12 applications with that version and got three interviews in the same week. The content hadn’t changed. The structure had. That’s usually the gap between a resume that gets read and one that doesn’t, it’s rarely the experience itself, it’s whether the page lets someone find it in eight seconds.
When it makes more sense to start from a template instead
I’ve just spent this whole post telling you how to build from a blank page, so here’s my honest caveat. If you’re short on time, or Word’s tab stops and formatting menus aren’t your thing, a well built template will get you a clean, ATS friendly resume faster, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s worth knowing how to pick the right Microsoft template for your specific industry, since a creative agency and a compliance role need very different visual treatments. And once you’ve picked one, the process for customising a professional Word template step by step covers most of the same fixes I’ve just walked you through, applied to an existing layout instead of a blank page.
If you’re further along in your career, it’s also worth reading up on how an experienced professional’s resume should be formatted differently from a fresher’s, because the from scratch structure I’ve described above shifts once you’ve got 10-plus years and need to compress older roles rather than list every single one in full detail. And if you’re comparing options across different fields entirely, there’s a solid overview of where to find resume templates for different careers and which ones are worth your time.
The one habit that matters more than the software
Whether you build in Word from a blank page or start from a template, update the resume every time something worth noting happens at work, not the night before you need it. I keep a running note on my phone titled “resume lines” and drop a sentence into it whenever I hit a milestone or finish a project with a measurable result. Six months later, building or updating the actual document takes 20 minutes instead of a stressful evening trying to remember what you did in March.
Frequently asked questions
Is it better to build a resume in Word from scratch or use a template?
Building from scratch gives you full control over formatting and avoids the tables and text boxes that trip up applicant tracking systems, but a good template is faster if you’re short on time. Either approach works as long as you strip out columns, graphics, and text boxes before you send it anywhere.
What font and size should I use for a Word resume?
Use Calibri, Arial, Garamond, or Georgia at 10.5 to 11 point for body text, with your name at 18 to 20 point in bold at the top. Avoid Times New Roman and anything decorative, since plain and readable outperforms stylish for both software and human readers.
How long should a resume built in Word be?
One page if you have under 10 years of relevant experience, two pages maximum if you have 15-plus years across several roles worth including. Anything longer than two pages tends to get skimmed rather than read, no matter how strong the content is.
Why isn’t my Word resume getting past the applicant tracking system?
The most common causes are tables, text boxes, multi column layouts, and contact details placed inside a header or footer, all of which some ATS software fails to read correctly. Rebuild the layout using simple left aligned text and tab stops instead, and your content should suddenly become visible to the same systems that were skipping over it before.
