Updated 2026-10-04
The order a recruiter reads a fresher resume in, the six things that belong on it, and the section to delete.
A recruiter spends well under a minute on a fresher resume. That minute is spent looking for evidence, not formatting, so the goal is to make evidence impossible to miss.
Name your strongest project and the stack in the first screenful. “Full-stack developer — React, Node, Postgres; built and deployed X to 200 users” beats an objective statement, every time. Delete the objective statement.
Any of them count as work experience. For each line use a verb and a result: “cut page load from 4s to 1.5s”, “automated a manual report”, “fixed 12 issues in a library used by 3,000 projects”.
Degree, institution, year, one line of relevant coursework. If your grades are strong, show them; if not, they are not the first thing a developer hiring process looks at.
Each one gets a link that works and a sentence on what it does and what you did. A GitHub profile full of forks and tutorial commits is worse than two repositories with real history.
List what you can be interviewed on. A skills list that survives two follow-up questions is an asset; one that doesn't is a liability.
One column, no tables, no photos, PDF, standard headings. Many applicant systems parse resumes automatically, and creative layouts are what they fail to parse.
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