With unemployment on the rise and so many people trying to get the same position within a single company, it is important to stand out from the crowd and be as prepared as possible. One of the most commonly overlooked steps in being prepared is having a proper resume written before you go in to apply for that particular position. Unfortunately, writing a resume that will stand out in the crowd without being too over the top can be difficult to do and many of the people that are skilled at this craft have turned it into a very lucrative career.

However, if you’re not in a position to pay up to several hundreds of dollars to have someone else write a resume for you, don’t panic, there are still options that you can use for free. One of the most common is to look at different sample resumes that you can find online and use them to create your own using a standard word processor. This is time consuming and getting the formatting perfect is a daunting task. The other option, that many more people are using, is to use a template that has been created and can be found online for free.

These templates allow you to use the formatting options that work well for others and simply fill in the information that it requests. In many cases, this style of resume will look a lot like everyone else’s, but you can always use different fonts for your header (title) and jazz it up using different ways of describing your jobs and education than the standard. These free templates are perfect for anyone who wants to advance their career without spending money in the process and allow a certain amount of creativity for an individualized process where you and your skills can shine on paper as well as in the workplace.