Free CV template for Norway: what works and what to avoid

Free can be fine, or it can cost you the job

There are many places to download a CV template for free. Word and Google Docs have built-in templates, and Canva has a gallery of several hundred. Universities' career centres publish their own templates students can use.

That sounds as if it should be easy. In practice the free templates on the market are often either too boring (they haven't changed since 2010), or too beautiful (designed to impress humans, but two columns, icons and text boxes can make recruitment systems read the CV in the wrong order or lose part of it).

The free template is not the problem. The problem is the expectation that a template alone is enough. It never is.

The most common free sources, honestly assessed

Word and Google Docs

Microsoft and Google have basic CV templates built in, and the simplest of them are safe for recruitment systems. The structure is simple, the fonts are safe, and the PDF export keeps the text layer intact.

The downside: the templates are quite generic and look dated. That isn't a problem if you work in the public sector or in industries where a conservative CV is expected (law, finance, healthcare). It is a problem if you are applying for design, marketing or tech roles where the style of the CV is read as part of the first impression.

Recommended: Word and Docs templates if you have under 30 minutes and just need something finished.

Canva

Canva has a big gallery of CV templates, and many look great. The problem: many Canva templates are two-column with icons and coloured boxes, which is exactly what an ATS struggles with. Text in columns is often parsed wrongly, and icons are pure graphics with no text value.

If you have to use Canva, choose a single-column template without icons and without coloured backgrounds behind text areas. Export as PDF, and test that you can copy all the text into an empty document with Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C.

Recommended: Canva is fine for creative industries where the look of the CV really counts, but always test the PDF export with a text copy.

Templates from universities

Many Norwegian universities and university colleges publish career-guidance templates you can download. They are built for students and recent graduates, and lean conservative. They are often good starting points, but some date from 2018 or earlier and may look it.

Check the date on the template before you use it. If the font choice or the layout looks dated, adjust it in Word before you export.

Career centres in municipalities

NAV (the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration), adult education centres (Voksenopplæring) and some municipal career centres offer CV templates. They are typically very simple, and simple templates are read well by recruitment systems, but they are also very dull. If you are in a process with a NAV adviser, these are safe choices. NAV's own CV service on arbeidsplassen.no was shut down on 1 October 2025, see the alternatives to NAV's CV service.

Søknadsbasen

For full transparency: the CV builder is free, but it has no template picker yet, and the PDF gets a small watermark. The template picker and a PDF without the watermark are part of Pro, which costs 79 kroner a month. As a new customer you can try Pro free for 7 days, but the trial requires a card and converts to 79 kroner a month if you don't cancel before it ends. If you only need one CV for one specific application, you can build it during the trial and cancel before the first charge.

We obviously don't recommend that as a long-term solution, but it is a legitimate way to use the tool, and the builder tells you if the template is hard for recruitment systems to read.

What all free templates have in common

Whatever the source, all CV templates share the same basic structure. If a template departs a lot from this, chances are it was designed, not built:

1. Contact information at the top, ideally one line or a block of 2 to 3 lines
2. A summary or About me, 3 to 4 sentences
3. Experience in reverse chronological order
4. Education, also reverse chronological
5. Skills or competence
6. Optionally languages, certifications, volunteer work

That's it. More than this is often unnecessary noise, less is too thin for most roles. If you want to see the structure filled in with real content, we have three annotated CV examples.

Three tests before you send the CV

Before you send a CV built on a free template, do these three tests. They take five minutes together, and they catch the most common problems.

The text-copy test

Open the PDF, press Ctrl+A to select all text, and Ctrl+C to copy. Paste into an empty Notepad or Google Docs document.

Read what comes out. If you see names, titles, dates and your bullet points in a logical order, you are safe. If it is empty, parts are missing, or it is scrambled, the layout needs fixing. Whether you should send PDF or Word is covered in the guide on file format and ATS.

The mum test

Send the CV to your mum or a friend who doesn't work in your industry. Ask them to tell you what you do, where you have worked, and for how long. If they get it right within 10 seconds without you saying anything, the CV is readable enough for a human.

If they can't, the structure isn't clear enough.

The scary-fast test

Set a timer for 6 seconds, lay the CV flat on the table, take a quick look, and turn away. Write down what you remember. If you remember your name, your latest role and one concrete thing you have done, the CV is structured right.

If it all turns to mush, the fonts are too small, the colours too similar, or the sections too intertwined.

When a free template isn't enough any more

There is one situation where a free template stops being enough: when you are applying for more than a couple of jobs and notice that you tailor the CV every time.

For each application you have to adjust the summary, re-rank the bullets under roles, update skills against the ad and maybe add relevant projects. With a static Word template you end up with eight versions of the same CV in your Downloads folder, you mix up which is the newest, and some of them still have a typo from the last application.

That is the point where a tool like Søknadsbasen's CV builder pays off. You own one CV with several variants, and the pipeline in Søknadsbasen links each variant to the application it was used for. No messy Downloads folder.

A practical start: three templates you can use today

To make this guide concrete, here are three templates that actually work:

1. Microsoft Word: Open Word, click New, search for "Resume". Choose a template called "Resume (chronological)", "Modern resume" or "Basic resume". Skip anything with "Creative" in the name.

2. Google Docs: Open Google Docs, click Template gallery at the top, choose the "Resumes" section. "Spearmint" and "Coral" are solid ATS-friendly choices.

3. Søknadsbasen: Sign up for free and build the CV in the CV builder. The free builder uses the default template and suggests "ATS Clean" if the template is hard for recruitment systems to read. With Pro you choose the template yourself. Export to PDF when you are done.

Pick one. Don't spend an hour weighing 10 different ones. CVs that look nice are rejected on the same terms as CVs that don't. It is the content that counts.

Once you have the template, write it

The template hunt is the smallest part of the job. The hardest part is to write the content right, tailor it to ATS systems, and word the section about yourself so it catches interest without overdoing it.

The free template is only the paper. What you write on it is the CV.