An ATS resume template has one job: survive being read by software that has never heard of a 6G ticket, a 480V service or a D6 dozer. That means one column, real headings and no graphics. Everything after that is content, and the content is where trades resumes are actually won or lost.
Four templates below – a blank one to copy, the same template filled in so you can see the difference, and two variants for the situations that break the standard shape. All four are plain text on purpose. If you want to know why these choices matter, the ATS friendly resume guide explains what actually breaks parsing.
Copy this ATS resume template
Select it, copy it, paste it into a blank Word or Google Docs file. Replace everything in square brackets. Delete any line you cannot fill in honestly – a shorter true resume beats a padded one every time.
[FULL NAME] [City, State ZIP] | [(555) 555-0100] | [firstname.lastname@email.com] [Trade] | [X] years | [Licence or main certification] | [Own transport / tools] [Availability - shift work, out-of-town, earliest start date] SUMMARY [Trade] with [X] years in [sector]. [The two or three things you actually do, with a number attached to at least one of them.] [One fact about your record - not an adjective.] EXPERIENCE [Job Title] - [Company], [City, State] [Mon YYYY] - Present - [What you did, with a quantity] - [What you did, with a quantity] - [Scope: crew size, project value, square footage, tonnage] - [Safety, inspection or quality record] - [Equipment, systems or codes you worked to] [Job Title] - [Company], [City, State] [Mon YYYY] - [Mon YYYY] - [What you did, with a quantity] - [What you did, with a quantity] - [What you did, with a quantity] SKILLS [Skill] | [Skill] | [Skill] | [Skill] [Skill] | [Skill] | [Skill] [Equipment or system] | [Equipment or system] CERTIFICATIONS [Exact certification name] - [year or expiry] [Exact certification name] - [year or expiry] [Licence type and number] - [state], [status] EDUCATION [Programme or apprenticeship] - [Institution], [year or hours]
Five section headings, in this order, spelled exactly like this: SUMMARY, EXPERIENCE, SKILLS, CERTIFICATIONS, EDUCATION. Application software looks for these words. “Career Objective” and “Core Competencies” are the kind of invention that makes a parser give up.
The same template, filled in
Same skeleton, real content. Notice how many lines carry a number – fourteen projects, 20,000 to 180,000 sq ft, 6 in. w.g., a 3-man crew, 8,000 hours. That is the difference between this and the version most people send.
DEREK HALVORSEN Minneapolis, MN 55411 | (612) 555-0148 | d.halvorsen.sm@email.com Sheet metal worker | 8 years | OSHA 30 | Own truck and hand tools Available for night shift and out-of-town work SUMMARY Sheet metal worker with 8 years in commercial HVAC installation. Duct fabrication and field install on buildings from 20,000 to 180,000 sq ft, to SMACNA pressure classes up to 6 in. w.g., and 8 years with no lost-time injuries. EXPERIENCE Sheet Metal Worker - Northland Mechanical, Minneapolis, MN Mar 2021 - Present - Installed rectangular and spiral duct on 14 commercial projects ranging from 20,000 to 180,000 sq ft - Fabricated and hung to SMACNA standards, pressure classes to 6 in. w.g., with leakage testing on 4 of those projects - Ran a 3-man crew on the last 6 jobs, including layout and material take-off from shop drawings - Coordinated ceiling space with pipefitters and electricians; no rework charged back on any of the 14 projects - Operated scissor and boom lift daily, certified on both Sheet Metal Apprentice - Twin Cities Air Systems, St Paul, MN Aug 2018 - Feb 2021 - Shop fabrication: brake, shear, plasma table, Pittsburgh lock - Field install of duct, grilles, registers and diffusers - Completed 8,000-hour apprenticeship SKILLS Rectangular and spiral duct | Shop fabrication | Field layout Shop drawing take-off | SMACNA standards | Duct leakage testing Brake, shear, plasma table | Scissor and boom lift Crew supervision | Blueprint reading CERTIFICATIONS OSHA 30-Hour Construction - 2025 Aerial Lift (scissor and boom) - 2025 First Aid / CPR - current EDUCATION Sheet Metal Apprenticeship, 8,000 hours - Local 10 JATC, 2022
Nothing here is decoration. Every line is either a fact a foreman needs or a number that proves one. If you are struggling to find numbers in your own work, how to quantify physical work walks through where they hide.
Variant: no certifications yet
The standard template assumes a CERTIFICATIONS block worth reading. If yours is empty, do not delete the heading and do not pad it – say what is in progress and move the weight onto attendance, physical capacity and availability, which is what an entry-level hiring decision actually turns on.
MARISOL AGUIRRE Phoenix, AZ 85009 | (602) 555-0119 | m.aguirre.work@email.com General labourer | 3 years | Own transport | Available immediately Open to 6:00 AM starts, weekends and out-of-town work SUMMARY Construction labourer with 3 years on residential and light commercial sites. Concrete prep and pour support, demolition and material handling, with perfect attendance across 26 months at my current employer. EXPERIENCE Construction Labourer - Sonoran Site Services, Phoenix, AZ Jun 2023 - Present - Formwork setup and stripping on 40+ residential slabs - Concrete pour support: chute handling, screeding, edging - Handled 40-70 lb material for 10-hour shifts in summer heat - Perfect attendance over 26 months - Kept the site swept and material staged for three trades Warehouse Associate - Desert Ridge Distribution, Phoenix, AZ Feb 2022 - May 2023 - Picked and packed 200-300 orders per shift - Loaded and unloaded trailers by hand and pallet jack SKILLS Formwork setup and stripping | Concrete pour support | Screeding Demolition | Material handling | Pallet jack | Hand and power tools Site cleanup and staging | Works in extreme heat CERTIFICATIONS Currently enrolled: OSHA 10-Hour Construction, completing [month] EDUCATION High school diploma - [School], [year]
More on this shape in writing a resume with no experience.
Variant: lead and supervisor roles
Once you are running crews, the resume has to argue about schedule, budget and people rather than your own hands. That justifies one extra block – PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS – directly under the summary, because on supervisory applications the project list is what gets read first.
ANTHONY DELACRUZ Newark, NJ 07105 | (973) 555-0182 | a.delacruz.lead@email.com Site superintendent | 16 years, 6 as lead | OSHA 30 | Own truck Licensed [state] [trade] licence #XXXXX, active SUMMARY Site superintendent with 16 years in commercial construction, the last 6 running crews of 12-25. Delivered 21 projects from $400K to $6.2M, 18 of them on or ahead of schedule, with no lost-time injuries across the last 4 years. PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS Medical office fit-out, Elizabeth NJ - $6.2M, 14 months, on schedule Retail ground-up, Bayonne NJ - $2.8M, 9 months, 3 weeks early Warehouse conversion, Newark NJ - $1.4M, 6 months, on schedule EXPERIENCE Site Superintendent - Harbourline Construction, Newark, NJ Apr 2020 - Present - Ran crews of 12-25 across 21 projects from $400K to $6.2M - Coordinated 8-14 subcontractors per project, including sequencing and conflict resolution in shared ceiling and shaft space - Held weekly owner and architect meetings; wrote the schedule updates and change order justifications - Cut punch-list items roughly 30% by moving QC walks to the end of each trade rather than the end of the project - No lost-time injuries in 4 years across roughly 90,000 man-hours Foreman - Passaic Commercial Builders, Paterson, NJ Jan 2014 - Mar 2020 - Ran crews of 5-10 on fit-out and ground-up commercial work - Trained and signed off 9 apprentices SKILLS Crew supervision 12-25 | Subcontractor coordination | Scheduling Change orders and RFIs | Owner and architect meetings | QC walks Budget tracking | Safety programme administration | Blueprint and structural plan reading | Procore CERTIFICATIONS OSHA 30-Hour Construction - 2025 First Aid / CPR - current Competent Person - Excavations, Scaffolds, Fall Protection - 2024
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The 4 samples above, as one editable Word file
Word .docx · 37 KB · ATS-safe formatting, no tables. Delete the note at the top before you send it.
This is the only variant where adding a section is worth it. Do not add a PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS block if your projects are three houses – it will read as padding.
What to change and what to leave alone
Change freely:
- The wording of every bullet – these are your jobs, not ours
- Section order below EXPERIENCE, if your certifications matter more than your skills list (welders and electricians: usually yes)
- The header lines – add a licence number, drop the availability line if it is not relevant
- How many bullets each job gets. Recent job: five or six. A job from nine years ago: two
Leave alone:
- The five heading words. They are what the parser matches on
- One column. Two columns is the single most common reason a trades resume comes out scrambled
- Plain hyphens for bullets. Wingdings arrows and box characters do not survive
- Dates as
Mon YYYY - Mon YYYY. Written that way they parse. “3 yrs” and “2019-present” cause trouble - Contact details as plain text lines, not in a header or text box. Anything in a Word header can vanish entirely
Converting a resume you already have
Most people reading this already have a resume. It was built in Word four years ago, or exported off a job board, and it has stopped getting replies. You do not need to start from the blank template above. In almost every case the writing is fine and the formatting is what the applicant tracking system chokes on.
Work through it in this order. Twenty minutes, and you do not retype a single bullet.
- Save a copy under a new name first. Keep the original. You may want the pretty version for a human-to-human email or a printed copy at the gate.
- Delete the layout. Tables, text boxes, columns, sidebars, headers and footers. This is the single biggest cause of failure. A two-column resume looks organised to you and parses as one scrambled column to the software – your job dates end up welded to your skills list.
- Delete the graphics. Logos, icons, photos, and especially skill rating bars. A line reading “MIG – four filled circles out of five” reaches the recruiter as “MIG” with no rating attached, so the rating was never worth anything. Write “MIG, 6 years, structural and pressure” instead.
- Pull your contact details out of the document header. If your name and phone number live in the Word header area, some parsers never read them at all. The resume goes in with no name on it. Put them in the first lines of the body.
- Rename your section headings to the boring ones. WORK EXPERIENCE, EDUCATION, CERTIFICATIONS, SKILLS. “Where I Have Worked” and “My Credentials” are not headings the parser recognises, so everything underneath them lands in the wrong field or in no field.
- Put every date in one format. Pick MM/YYYY and use it everywhere – 03/2021, not “March 2021” in one job and “Spring 21” in the next. Mixed formats are how a nine-year record turns into a two-year record.
- Rebuild the certification lines. Issuing body, exact certificate name, number, and expiry, one per line. This is the part of a trades resume that most often gets parsed into nothing, and it is the part a hiring manager actually filters on.
- Export as .docx. Use PDF only when the posting specifically asks for it. Both are usually readable, but .docx fails less often on older systems, and plenty of contractors still run older systems.
What you should not do while converting: do not delete content to make it fit a page limit, and do not paste the job posting into white text at the bottom. Keyword stuffing is detected, and a two-page trades resume with a real work history has never lost anyone a job.
You will also see tools advertised that promise to convert a resume to ATS format for free. They mostly run a formatting check, show you a score, and then ask for a subscription to fix what they found. The eight steps above are what those tools are checking for, and you can do all of them in the word processor you already have.
Save it and name it properly
Save as .docx unless the posting specifically asks for PDF. Both parse fine in modern systems, but .docx has never been the one that fails.
Name the file with your own name and the role: Derek-Halvorsen-Sheet-Metal-Worker.docx. Not resume final v3 REAL.docx. A human sees the filename before they open it, and on a shortlist of forty that is a real first impression.
Test it in two minutes
Open your finished file, select all, copy, and paste it into a plain text editor – Notepad, TextEdit, anything. What you see is roughly what the software sees.
- Are the section headings still on their own lines?
- Is your phone number still next to your name, or has it landed somewhere strange?
- Did any bullet turn into a box, a question mark or nothing at all?
- Is the order still top to bottom, or did a two-column layout interleave into nonsense?
If it survives that, it will survive the parser. This test costs two minutes and catches almost everything.
Frequently asked questions
Will a plain template like this look too basic next to a designed one?
To the software, a designed one often looks like nothing at all. To a foreman, a clean single column reads faster than a resume with a sidebar. Neither audience is impressed by graphics.
Should I put my certifications above my experience?
For welding, electrical and crane work, yes – the ticket is the gate, so put it where it is seen in the first three seconds. For general construction and labouring, experience first.
Can I use this template for a union apprenticeship application?
You can, but most intakes use their own form and score on aptitude testing and attendance. See apprentice electrician resume for what those applications actually weigh.
How long should it be?
One page under ten years of experience, two pages over. Two pages for a superintendent is normal. Three is never normal.
Do I need a different template for every application?
No. One template, and you change the summary line and reorder bullets to match the posting. That takes five minutes per application and matters more than the template does.
Related guides
Why these rules exist: ATS friendly resume for trades. Filled trade-specific examples: construction worker, electrician, welder. Writing the certifications block: how to list certifications. Gaps in the dates: employment gaps on a resume.
If you would rather not write it yourself
A template is the part nobody should be paying for, and now you have four. The content that goes into it is yours and cannot be outsourced – no writer knows your pressure classes, your crew sizes or your project values.
Do it yourself. A resume builder handles the single-column formatting that application software wants, which is the fiddly part. Take the template above, replace the content with your own numbers, and you are done in under an hour.
Pay someone to write it. Worth it mainly if you are applying somewhere competitive and you want a second pair of eyes on the content as well as the layout. If you go that route, Resumeble is a US-based writing service – where the writer sits matters on trades work, because someone unfamiliar with the trade flattens your specifics into generic phrasing. If you do, the code HARDHAT10 takes 10% off. Expect to be asked for your numbers either way, so do that homework first regardless of which route you take.
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