Keep it to one page
Recruiters often look at a fresher's resume for well under a minute before deciding whether to read on. One page forces you to pick your strongest points, and it is what most employers expect from someone early in their career. SlashResumex keeps every resume to one A4 page and fits the text for you.
The sections, in order
- Personal details: your name, phone number, a professional email address, your city, and links such as LinkedIn or GitHub.
- Education: your degree, college, years and score. For freshers this goes first, because it is your most recent and relevant experience.
- Experience: internships, part-time work, freelance work or student leadership. Leave it out rather than padding it.
- Skills: grouped, for example languages, frameworks, tools and databases.
- Projects: two or three that show what you can build or solve.
- Certifications: courses that are relevant to the role.
- Honours and awards: competitions, scholarships, ranks.
Personal details
Use an email address with your name in it. A full postal address is not needed; your city and state are enough. Do not add a photo, date of birth, marital status or religion unless the employer asks for them: they take space and are not used to judge your ability.
Education
List your highest qualification first. Include the degree and branch, the college, the years and your CGPA or percentage. Add your class 12 and class 10 results if the employer asks for them or if they are strong; otherwise one line each is enough.
Projects are your experience
For a fresher, projects are the best evidence of skill. For each one, name the project, say what it does, what you built yourself and what you used to build it. If there is a result, add it.
Weak: "Made a weather app." Stronger: "Built a weather app in JavaScript that shows a 5-day forecast from the OpenWeatherMap API; used by 40 classmates during exam week."
Skills
Group your skills so they are easy to scan, and only list what you could discuss in an interview. A long list of tools you have touched once makes the strong ones harder to see.
What to leave out
- An "Objective" paragraph that could apply to anyone.
- Hobbies, unless they relate to the job.
- References, or the line "references available on request".
- A declaration and signature at the bottom.
Before you send it
- Save it as a PDF, and name the file with your name, for example Priya-Sharma-Resume.pdf.
- Check it with the ATS checker to see the text an applicant tracking system will read.
- Read it once aloud. Typos are the easiest reason to be rejected and the easiest to fix.
