There is a quiet split in the resume template market. The visual templates win every Pinterest board and lose at most large companies because their layout confuses the parser. The plain templates do the opposite. The narrow space in the middle is where you want to live.
You do not need a beautiful resume. You need a legible one that does not throw away half your work in the parser step.
What a "good" template actually has
A template is a layout decision, not a personality test. The decisions that matter are small and boring.
A single column for the main content. Sidebars look modern, but most parsers read columns in the wrong order. The fix is mechanical: put everything in one column.
Section headings that match what the parser expects. "Work experience", "Education", "Skills", "Projects". Save the creative naming for the work itself.
Date formats that are consistent. "Jan 2022 to Mar 2024" or "01/2022 to 03/2024", but pick one and use it everywhere. A parser that has to handle three different date styles in one document tends to drop one.
Bullets that start with a verb. "Built", "Led", "Owned", "Cut", "Hired". Templates that ship with "Responsible for" as a placeholder train you to write the weakest version of your own resume.
Adequate margins (1.27cm or 0.5 inches at minimum) and a serif or clean sans-serif font around 10 to 11 points. Anything tighter makes the page feel cramped to scan.
What to avoid, even if it looks great
The visual flourishes that hurt parsing are exactly the ones that make a template stand out on a gallery page.
Two- and three-column layouts. Pictograms or progress bars to show skill levels. Vertical text in the margin. Decorative tables. Photos. Skills shown as filled circles or pie charts. Heavy use of colored boxes and contrasting fills. Anything that requires the reader to jump around the page in a specific order to make sense.
If a template has a sidebar that says "Languages: English, Spanish, French" with little flags, the parser is going to keep the flags and lose the languages.
A workable middle path
If you want some design without sacrificing parsing, three small choices are safe:
A muted accent color used only on headings and your name. Black bullets, black body text. The page still reads as black-on-white when printed in grayscale.
A short summary block at the top, three lines maximum, that names the job you want and what you bring to it.
A small skills section under the summary, written as a comma-separated line. Easy for the parser, easy for a recruiter to scan in three seconds.
Most paid resume builders today, including this one, generate output that follows this shape. If you are picking a template elsewhere, paste the resulting PDF into a free parser like Jobscan or the LinkedIn parser, and look at the JSON it spits back. If the fields are populated correctly, the template is fine. If half your roles are missing, the template lost.