Photo, Colour, Two Columns: What Actually Helps (and Hurts) Your CV
Design decisions on a CV are usually made on taste. They should be made on two questions: can the software read it, and does it help a human find the point faster?
Every CV design question gets answered with somebody's confident opinion. Photo or no photo. One column or two. Colour or black-and-white. Serif or sans. The confident opinions contradict each other, and most of them are regional habits presented as universal law.
There are really only two questions that matter, and every design decision reduces to them: can the parsing software read it correctly, and does it help a human find the important thing faster. Here's what the answers look like in practice.
The photo question: it depends entirely on where you're applying
This is the question people argue about most and it has a clean answer: it's a regional convention, not a quality judgement. Getting it wrong in either direction is a small, avoidable own goal.
| Market | Photo? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| UK & Ireland | No | Actively discouraged; some employers strip or reject applications with one |
| US & Canada | No | Standard practice is to omit it to reduce discrimination risk |
| Germany, Austria | Usually yes | Still customary despite equal-treatment law making it optional; a professional headshot is expected |
| Switzerland | Usually yes | Customary as part of a complete application dossier |
| France, Spain, Italy, Portugal | Common, optional | Widely used; omitting it is not penalised |
| Netherlands, Nordics | Mixed | Increasingly omitted; safe either way |
| Australia, New Zealand | No | Follows the UK convention |
If you do include one
Plain background, natural light, head and shoulders, dressed as you would be at the interview, looking at the camera, neutral-to-warm expression. Not a cropped wedding photo, not a holiday shot, not a five-year-old badge photo. A phone in front of a plain wall on an overcast day genuinely works.
The practical middle path
Keep two versions of your CV — one with a photo, one without — and choose by market. It's a two-second decision if the template supports it, and it means you never have to guess.
Two columns: the honest answer
The internet's standard advice is "never use two columns, ATS can't read them". That was largely true a decade ago and is now too blunt. Modern parsers handle many two-column layouts fine. But *many* is not *all*, and the failure mode is severe: your work history read in interleaved fragments.
- A narrow sidebar for contact details, skills and languages, with the whole work history in the main column, is generally safe — the sidebar contains short standalone items where order damage doesn't matter
- A true two-column layout where roles and dates sit in separate columns is the risky one
- Tables used for layout are worse than columns; some parsers flatten them unpredictably
- Text inside a graphic, header or footer is the reliably worst choice — often invisible to the parser entirely
Run the copy-paste test on any design you like
Open the PDF, select all, copy, paste into a plain text file. If your job titles, employers and dates appear in the right order and nothing is missing, the layout is fine regardless of how many columns it has. If it's scrambled, no amount of visual polish saves it. This takes twenty seconds and settles the argument for your specific file.
Our templates are rendered to PDF with a real text layer and checked for exactly this — plus you can switch layout, colour and photo on the same content and see the result instantly.
See the templatesColour: useful in small quantities, harmful in large ones
Colour on a CV has one legitimate job: helping the eye locate structure — section headings, your name, the boundaries between roles. Used for that, it measurably speeds up reading. Used decoratively, it competes with your content for attention and loses you nothing but wins you nothing either.
One accent colour
Applied to your name, section headings and maybe a thin rule. Everything else in near-black on white. This reads as considered and prints cleanly.
Deep, low-saturation tones
Navy, deep teal, burgundy, forest green, charcoal. They survive greyscale printing and photocopying, which still happens more often than you'd think.
Full-colour side panels
Fine in creative fields, risky elsewhere, and expensive to print. If you use one, keep all critical text out of it.
Multiple bright colours
Reads as decoration rather than structure and makes the page harder to scan, which is the opposite of the goal.
Light grey body text
Popular in design templates, genuinely hard to read, and worse on a printout. Body text should be near-black.
Skill bar charts and star ratings
They claim precision they don't have ("85% at leadership"), carry no text for the parser, and take space that a real example would use better.
Typography and space, in four rules
- 1One typeface, two weights. Regular for body, bold for headings and titles. Mixing families is the fastest way to look amateur.
- 2Body text 10–11.5pt, never below 9.5. If you need 9pt to fit, you have a content problem, not a layout problem — cut something.
- 3Margins no tighter than 1.5cm. White space is what makes a dense page scannable; a wall of edge-to-edge text gets skimmed, not read.
- 4Consistent spacing between roles. Uneven gaps are the visual equivalent of typos — readers register the sloppiness without identifying why.
Design working against you
- •Three typefaces and four colours
- •9pt text with 8mm margins to fit two pages into one
- •Skill bars, rating stars, a radar chart
- •Contact details in the page header
- •Icons replacing the words "Email" and "Phone"
Design working for you
- •One typeface, one accent colour
- •10.5pt text with room to breathe
- •Skills as a plain, readable line of text
- •Contact details in the body of page one
- •Icons beside the words, never instead of them
The icon trap
Decorative icons are usually drawn as vector shapes with no text behind them. An envelope icon followed by your address is fine. An envelope icon *instead of* the word "Email", next to text that's also part of the graphic, means the parser may find no contact details at all — and an unreachable candidate is a rejected candidate.
Length and file format
| Decision | Default | Exception |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 1 page under ~5 years' experience, 2 pages after | Academic and research CVs, where publication lists justify more |
| Format | PDF, always, unless a form demands .docx | Some agencies and internal ATS uploads specifically ask for Word |
| File name | `Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf` | Add the role name when applying to several positions at one company |
| Fonts | Embedded in the PDF (standard when exporting properly) | Never send a design-tool export that rasterises the text |
Design is a tiebreaker, never the argument
A beautifully designed CV describing vague duties loses to a plain one describing real results. Design earns you a slightly longer, slightly more favourable read — which is worth having, and is not the same as being the reason you get hired.
The short version
- Photo is a regional convention: yes in DACH and Switzerland, no in the UK/US, optional elsewhere.
- Sidebars for short items are usually safe; true two-column work histories are the risk.
- One accent colour used for structure; near-black body text; no skill bars.
- One typeface, 10–11.5pt, margins that give the page room to breathe.
- Copy-paste your PDF into a text file — that twenty-second test beats every design opinion.
Try your content in a template that's built to be read — by both audiences
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Frequently asked questions
Should I put a photo on my CV?
It depends on the market. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland a professional headshot is still customary. In the UK, Ireland, US, Canada and Australia you should omit it — some employers actively discourage or strip it. In France, Spain, Italy and Portugal it's common but optional. Keeping two versions and choosing by country is the simplest approach.
Can an ATS read a two-column CV?
Many modern parsers handle a narrow sidebar containing contact details and skills perfectly well. A true two-column layout that splits roles and dates across columns is riskier, because a parsing error scrambles your entire work history. Test your specific file: copy the PDF text into a plain text document and check the order is intact.
Is colour on a CV unprofessional?
No, if it's doing a job. One accent colour on your name and section headings helps a reader locate structure quickly and reads as considered. Multiple bright colours, full-colour panels behind text, and light grey body copy all make the page harder to scan — which is the opposite of what design is for.
What font should I use on a CV?
Any clean, widely available typeface at 10–11.5pt: Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, Lato, Source Sans, Garamond or Georgia are all fine. What matters far more than the choice is consistency — one family, two weights, even spacing. Avoid anything decorative, and never go below 9.5pt to squeeze in extra content.
Should I send my CV as a PDF or a Word document?
PDF by default: it preserves your layout everywhere and modern parsers read it fine. Send .docx only when a form or recruiter explicitly asks — some agencies edit the file before passing it on. Never send an image-based PDF exported from a design tool, because the text layer disappears and the parser sees nothing at all.