An ATS-safe CV: single column or designed template — and which tool?

The tools’ landing pages compared

All captured on 4 September 2026 at the same window width, so the comparison is fair.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   Add your current CV and a Swiss advert, AI writes one tailored to it. Free to start, no signup.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. lebenslauf.ch

   Free, but you write the whole CV yourself in an empty form. Every line from scratch, no AI help.

   lebenslauf.ch →

3. 

   3. cvswiss.ch

   AI-written Swiss CV in five minutes.

   cvswiss.ch →

4. 

   4. cv-easy.ch

   Done in 10 minutes, CHF 12 one-off.

   cv-easy.ch →

5. 

   5. lebenslaufapp.ch

   CV and cover letter, free to try.

   lebenslaufapp.ch →

The tools compared directly

As of 4 September 2026. Every figure for another tool comes from that tool's own site; "n/s" means it was not readable there — not that the feature is missing. Our row comes from the code and from walking the live flow.

What we measured on our own export — including the part that failed

A comparison that tests other people's products and describes its own is not a comparison. So on 4 September 2026 we put our own CV through the same treatment our 29 August test gave to eleven other constructions: the document the editor serves to a visitor who is not signed in, set with the live site's stylesheet, printed to an A4 PDF through a browser's print dialog, then read back with two independent text extractors. Both agreed, character for character.

The good half first. All eleven blocks came out complete, and the nine whose order matters came out in the intended sequence: name, profile, competences, achievements, professional experience — and only then the contents of the sidebar. That is a build decision rather than luck. In the document the main column is written before the sidebar, even though on paper the sidebar sits alongside it. As a control we set the same page with the two swapped in the document, visually indistinguishable from the first. There, education, skills and certifications came out ahead of the person's name. Two pages that look identical produce two completely different text files.

Now the bad half. Not one of the eleven section headings was recoverable as a word from the PDF. "Profile" comes out as P R O F I L E, "Professional experience" as a spaced-out string of letters. The cause is a single line in our stylesheet: the headings are set at 10 pixels with 1.4 pixels of letter-spacing, which is fourteen hundredths of the font size. Our own August measurement put the point at which headings stop being findable at around twelve hundredths. We are above it. A program that segments a dossier by its headings finds none of ours in our PDF.

The same document as a Word file: eleven out of eleven

Because the editor offers both formats, we sent the same CV through the Word export on the same day — using the application's own export code, run in a real browser — then unpacked the resulting file and read it. All eleven headings are present as whole words: "PROFILE", "PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE", "EDUCATION". In a Word file, letter-spacing is a formatting attribute sitting beside the text rather than part of it. In a PDF it becomes actual spaces; in a Word file the word stays a word.

The same file settles the ordering question too. The Word export builds the two columns as a single borderless table row with two cells: the entire main column of both pages on the left, the entire sidebar content on the right. Reading the file gives you one cell in full, then the other. That is exactly the order you want, and it is a different animal from the table that alternates left and right row by row and interleaves the sidebar into your work history. Many Word templates sold as "two-column" are the second kind.

The practical rule that follows holds whichever tool you use. If the apply button leads into an applicant system and the form accepts Word, send the Word file. If a person opens the dossier — and in our index roughly half of open Swiss adverts route to the employer's own site, only a good third into an applicant system — the PDF is the calmer choice, because it looks the same everywhere.

"ATS-optimised" is a template name, not a property

We counted the label on three vendors' public template pages on 4 September 2026. On Microsoft's resume page seven of about thirty named templates carry it — "ATS healthcare resume", "ATS office manager resume", "ATS Bold accounting resume" — and a link invites you to "Explore more ATS-friendly templates". cvswiss.ch shows fourteen templates and prints beneath them: "All templates are ATS-optimized and follow Swiss CV standards." In Canva's German gallery the abbreviation appears in none of the 55 visible template names; in the English gallery exactly once, inside a name.

Three vendors, three incompatible uses of the same three letters: a category covering a quarter of the range, a property claimed for the whole range, and a colour-word sitting next to "Minimalist" and "Corporate". When one label means three different things at three vendors, it is describing an expectation rather than a property. That is not an accusation against any of them — it is the reason the label cannot help you choose.

What is worth reading on cvswiss.ch is the layout wording rather than the ATS wording. Of the fourteen, two are explicitly single-column — "Academic / LaTeX" with "Single-column layout", "Banner" with "No sidebar, clean single column". The other twelve carry a sidebar or a two-column body, and two of those are described as "Education-first layout" and "Education-first order". That is a statement about order, and it is more useful than any ATS badge, because it tells you what comes first. We did not test what comes out of their paid download — that would have meant buying one — so we make no claim about it.

If you are applying from abroad, some of these tools are closed to you

The English-speaking reader of this page is disproportionately applying into Switzerland from outside it, and the tool list narrows for that reader in ways nobody mentions. Canva, Microsoft and Europass work from anywhere. cvswiss.ch runs in English as well as the three national languages. But most of the Swiss-built CV tools are German-only interfaces, and a German-language advert — which is what you will be answering, since German-language postings are the largest single share of the open stock — needs a CV in German whether or not the tool speaks it.

That is also the answer to a question that looks like a layout question and is not: which language should the CV be in? The language of the advert, every time. A designed template does nothing about this and a single-column one does nothing about it either. What matters is whether your tool can produce the document in the language the posting was written in. Ours generates it in the language of the interface you are working in, which is one of four.

And a Swiss-specific contrast worth carrying into whatever template you pick: in the United Kingdom and the United States a photo on a CV is discouraged, in Switzerland it is conventional and its absence is noticed. Almost every "ATS-friendly" template in the English-language galleries is built on the assumption that there is no photo — which is a reasonable assumption in the market those templates were designed for, and the wrong one here.

Who should use which

Use Canva if you work in a design occupation. There the sheet is the work sample, and a designed page is the point rather than a risk. It is a small group, though: in our index roughly 3.5 per cent of open adverts carry a title from design, marketing or media, and 0.4 per cent are actual design occupations (measured 24 August 2026). Everyone else is buying design freedom nobody asked for.

Use a Word template for the single application whose file you want to keep afterwards. It costs nothing on an existing licence, works without an internet connection, and lets you move any line yourself — including the order inside the document, which no online tool exposes. Use Europass when a job or a recognition procedure asks for it by name; the form is single-column and available in 31 language editions, but it is built for the EU and has no field for a work permit line or a workload in per cent.

Use cvswiss.ch if you are writing one application and want a clean PDF for CHF 5 — cheaper than any subscription, and two of their templates are explicitly single-column, which we do not offer at all. And use us if Swiss adverts are what you answer week after week: we rewrite the CV from the text of the advert in about a minute, then let you edit any line by hand or by instruction, export PDF and Word without a watermark, fill the RAV job-search-efforts form at /arbeitsbemuehungen from your tracked applications, and open the editor without an account. What you will not get from us is a single-column version — and, until we change one line in the stylesheet, not a heading a program can find as a word in the PDF either.

The rule in three sentences

First: the column count is not the question. Across eleven measured constructions nothing was ever lost; what shifts is the order, and it follows the position in the document rather than the position on the page. Second: the "ATS-optimised" label carries no information, because it means three different things at three vendors — check the file your tool produces instead. Third: if the apply button leads into an applicant system and the form takes Word, send the Word file; it carries the headings across as words, and the PDF may not.

The check takes half a minute and beats every template description: open your PDF, select all the text, paste it into a plain text editor, and read it. If the name is at the top and the roles follow in the right order, the arrangement is fine however many columns the page has. Then search that text for the word "Experience". If you cannot find it, your headings are letter-spaced, and to a program that segments a dossier by its headings they are not there.