If you’re applying to TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, Deloitte, startups or MNC graduate programmes, your resume almost always goes through software first: a campus placement portal, Naukri or LinkedIn, or the company’s own ATS such as Workday, SuccessFactors or Taleo.
For freshers, that means two things. The format must be simple enough to parse, and projects, internships and skills have to do the work that job experience does for others.
The fresher resume format that works
One page, one column, in this order:
- Name and contact: phone with +91, a professional email, city, and your LinkedIn and GitHub links.
- Headline: “B.Tech Computer Science (2026) | Java, Spring Boot, SQL”.
- Summary: 2 lines on what you study, what you’ve built, and the role you want.
- Education: degree, college, years and CGPA (if 7+). Add Class 12 and 10 percentages only if the company asks.
- Projects: 2–3, each with what you built, the tech used and a result.
- Internships, if any.
- Skills: grouped as Languages, Frameworks, Tools and Databases.
- Certifications and achievements: NPTEL, AWS, hackathons, coding contest ranks.
Leave out photo, date of birth, father’s name, religion, marital status and a “Declaration: I hereby declare…” line. Private companies don’t need them, and they take space. Add them only if a government or PSU form specifically asks.
What to write instead of work experience
Projects (your strongest section)
Write projects like job bullets: what you built, with what, and what happened.
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Weak: Made a library management system.
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Strong: Built a library management web app (React, Node.js, MySQL) used by 300 students in my department. It cut book-issue time from about 5 minutes to under 1.
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Weak: ML project on house prices.
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Strong: Trained a gradient-boosting model on 20K Bengaluru housing listings with a 0.12 RMSE. Deployed it with Flask on Render. Code on GitHub.
Internships
Even a short internship counts. Name the company, the tech, and one concrete outcome.
College activities
Pick the ones that show a skill the job wants: leading a tech fest team, teaching juniors, running the coding club, or a hackathon finish.
Keywords: match the job post, not a template
Placement drives and job posts list the exact skills they screen for. If the post says “Java, Spring Boot, REST APIs, SQL”, those words should appear in your skills and in at least one project bullet.
- Use the exact spelling: “JavaScript”, not “Java script”. “Node.js”, not “node”.
- Spell out acronyms once: “Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)”.
- Don’t list 25 technologies you’ve touched once. Interviewers will ask about them.
For the full method, see how to tailor your resume to a job description.
Common fresher mistakes that hurt with ATS
| Mistake | Why it hurts | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Canva template with two columns and icons | Parsers mix up the columns, and icons have no text | One column with text labels |
| Skill bars like “Python ●●●●○” | Software reads nothing, recruiters learn nothing | Write “Python (advanced)” or just “Python” |
| Objective: “Seeking a challenging role…” | Generic, and the same as every other resume | A 2-line summary with your stack and target role |
| File named “resume_final_new2.pdf” | Looks careless | “Rahul-Sharma-Resume.pdf” |
| Scanned or image PDF | No text to read at all | Export from Word or Google Docs |
| Two or more pages for a fresher | Recruiters skim, and page 2 often isn’t read | Cut to one page. See resume length |
Test it before the placement drive
Run the copy-paste test: open your PDF, select all, and paste into Notepad. If the text comes out jumbled or missing, ATS software will see the same mess.
Or upload it to BrightResume’s free ATS checker. It runs 30 checks, shows which lines need work, and lists missing keywords when you paste a job link. You can start from the student resume example or the software engineer example. For the basics of how ATS software works, read what makes a resume ATS-friendly.