Pulse

Pulse makes a specific trade: it spends page space on whitespace to buy legibility. Rules and spacing carry the structure instead of colour blocks or heavy type. The result reads as current and considered, and it is genuinely easier to scan than a dense document — a reader can find the boundary between two roles without effort.

That trade has a cost you should be aware of before choosing it. Generous spacing means less content per page. If you have twelve years of experience across five employers plus a substantial skills section, Pulse will push you onto a third page where a denser template would have held two. For most commercial applications, two well-composed pages beat three airy ones, so if you are content-heavy, look at Nova or Prism instead.

Where Pulse wins is early-to-mid career. With three to eight years of experience, you have enough substance to fill a page properly but not enough to fight for space — exactly the situation where whitespace reads as confidence rather than as padding. A junior resume stretched to fill a page with wide margins looks thin; a focused one-page Pulse resume with real outcomes in it looks deliberate.

The absence of a sidebar background keeps Pulse quieter than Onyx while using a similar two-column structure. Choose Pulse when you want the layout to feel contemporary; choose Onyx when you want more visual weight and separation.

In tech and startup hiring specifically, a minimal contemporary document matches the register of the sector without making a design claim you then have to live up to. It is a safe, current default for engineers, product managers, and analysts.