Fresher resume basics

One page. Single column. Standard headings — Education, Projects, Skills, Internships, Certifications. A common font at 10–12pt. Exported as a text PDF (never a photo or scan of a printout), named something like Priya-Sharma-Frontend-Resume.pdf.

The reason for the plainness is mechanical: most mid-size and large companies in India run applications through an ATS — Workday, Greenhouse, Lever and similar — which parses your PDF into fields before a person reads it. Tables, two-column layouts, icons and graphics parse badly or not at all. A beautifully designed resume that the software reads as gibberish loses to a plain one every time.

• Photo, date of birth, gender, marital status, religion, nationality and father's name. None of these help, some invite bias, and no ATS field wants them.
• Your full postal address — city and state are enough.
• An “Objective” paragraph about seeking a challenging role in a dynamic organisation. Every recruiter has read it ten thousand times; it says nothing about you.
• The declaration line (“I hereby declare that the above information is true…”) with date and place. It is a habit from paper forms and wastes three lines of your one page.
• Hobbies, unless they are genuinely distinctive and you can talk about them.

Projects do the work that job history does for experienced candidates. Two or three are enough, and each needs: what it is, what it is built with, and a link (GitHub or a live URL). A project a recruiter can open and click is worth more than five they have to take on faith.

Internships, freelance work, college-fest responsibilities and open-source contributions all count as experience — list them with dates and what you actually did. For education, include your CGPA if it is 7.0 or above; below that, leave the number off and let projects lead.

Weak bullets describe the assignment. Strong bullets show what you built and what happened:

• Before:"Made a website using HTML and CSS as a college project."
• After:"Built a hostel mess-menu voting app (React, Firebase) used by ~200 students; weekly menu decisions moved from paper polls to the app."

The pattern: verb, what you built, the stack in brackets, and one concrete outcome or number. If there is no number, a specific fact ("deployed on the department server", "open-sourced with 14 stars") still beats an adjective.

ATS screening and recruiter keyword searches both work off the job description. Before applying, read the JD and make sure the skills it names — the ones you genuinely have — appear in your resume in the same words ("REST APIs", not just "backend"). This is not keyword stuffing; it is writing in the vocabulary the reader is scanning for. Two or three tailored applications beat twenty copies of the same PDF.

• One page, single column, text PDF.
• Phone number and email are correct, and the email is a sensible one.
• Every project has a working link — open each one in an incognito window.
• No typos: read it aloud once, slowly. Inconsistent formatting and spelling errors are the fastest way to signal carelessness.
• The skills section matches the job you are sending it to — then find that opening on our fresher listings and apply on the company's official page.