Writing your first resume for campus placements

The hard part of a first resume is not formatting. It is that the section everybody says matters most, work experience, is the one you do not have. So people pad it, and padding is obvious.

A better way to think about it: the reader already knows you have not worked. They are not looking for experience. They are looking for evidence that you can do something and finish it.

The order that works for a student

Standard resume order puts experience first because for most people it carries the most weight. For you it does not, so the order changes.

1. 1.Name and contact details. In the body of the document, not in a header, or they can get dropped. Email you actually check, phone, and one link that is worth clicking.
2. 2.A two line summary. What you are studying, what kind of role you want, and the single most relevant thing you have done. Skip it if you cannot make it specific.
3. 3.Projects. This is your experience section. It goes above education.
4. 4.Skills. A plain comma separated list of things you could be asked about.
5. 5.Education. Degree, college, year, and your marks if they help you.
6. 6.Anything else that shows commitment. Positions of responsibility, competitions, teaching, a club you actually ran.

Projects are the part that matters

A placement reader has forty resumes from your college with the same degree and similar marks. Projects are where they differ, and most students undersell them badly.

The common version says: Built a web app using React and Node. That tells a reader nothing except that you followed a tutorial, because it is what everybody writes.

The useful version answers three questions. What problem, what did you build, what happened.

If nobody used it, say what you learned that you could not have learned from the tutorial. Honest and specific beats impressive and vague.

What to do about the empty space

A first resume should be one page and it is fine for that page not to be crammed. Padding is worse than space. Things that genuinely earn their line:

• Coursework, but only the relevant five or six. Not your whole transcript.
• Positions of responsibility. Running an event for 300 people is real logistics experience and reads as such.
• Competitions and hackathons, with what you actually built, not just that you attended.
• Teaching or tutoring. It shows you can explain things, which is half of most jobs.
• Open source contributions, however small, with a link.

Things that do not: a list of soft skills you have asserted about yourself, declarations that the above is true, your father's name, your date of birth, a photograph unless the employer asked for one, and hobbies that are just the word reading.

Marks, and whether to put them

Put them if they help. Many campus processes have a cutoff anyway, so leaving them off looks like hiding rather than like modesty. If your marks are weak, put them once without emphasis and spend the space on projects instead. Somebody with ordinary marks and a thing they built that people use is a more interesting candidate than the reverse, and readers know it.

Before you send it

1. 1.One column. No tables, no sidebar, contact details in the body. Here is why.
2. 2.Select all the text and paste it into a plain editor. If your phone number is missing, fix that before anything else.
3. 3.Read your bullets and ask of each one: could anyone in my class have written this? If yes, make it specific or cut it.
4. 4.Get one person who does not know your project to read it. If they cannot tell what you built, the bullet is not finished.