You do have experience. It just isn't called a job yet. Your final-year project, the internship that lasted eight weeks, the college fest website you built, the hackathon you lost: that is the material. A fresher resume works when it treats those things with the same seriousness a working engineer gives their last role, and fails when it pads them out with an objective statement and a list of hobbies.
So the short answer: put education at the top, projects directly under it, and write each project the way you would describe a job. Keep it to one page. Cut everything that a hundred other freshers could have written word for word.
What goes at the top
Your name, phone number, email, LinkedIn and GitHub (or a portfolio link if you are a designer). City is enough for location; you do not need your full address, date of birth, father's name or a photo. Those are a hangover from old biodata formats and they take up space a recruiter will skip anyway.
Then education. For a fresher this is the strongest signal you have, so it goes first. Degree, branch, college, graduation year, and your CGPA or percentage if it helps you. If your CGPA is below the cut-off a company lists (many campus drives use 6.0 or 7.0), leave it off rather than draw attention to it. Some forms will ask for it separately; that is fine, answer honestly there.
Class 10 and 12 marks: include them if they are strong or if you are applying to service companies that screen on them. Product companies mostly don't care. One line each is plenty.
Should you write an objective?
No.
"Seeking a challenging position in a reputed organisation where I can apply my skills for the growth of the company" tells the reader nothing, and they have seen it four hundred times this week. If you want something at the top, write a two-line summary that is specific to you: "Final-year CSE student at a tier-2 college in Pune. Built and deployed three full-stack projects in React and Node; one has around 200 weekly users from my college." That says something. The generic objective says nothing, so cut it and give the space to a project.
Projects are your work experience
This is the section that decides whether you get a call. Most fresher resumes list projects like this:
- E-commerce Website: Developed an e-commerce website using MERN stack. Implemented login, cart and payment features.
Every recruiter screening for freshers has read that exact line. It says what you built, which is the least interesting part, because tutorials build the same thing. What they want to know is what you decided, what broke, and whether anybody used it.
A better version of the same project:
- Second-hand textbook marketplace for my college (React, Node, MongoDB). Built it after seniors kept selling books through WhatsApp groups. Around 60 students listed books in the first month.
- Wrote the search so it matched on subject code as well as title, because that is how students actually look for books here.
- Hit a bug where two people could buy the same listing at once; fixed it with a status check inside a MongoDB transaction.
Same stack, same scale. But now there is a reason it exists, a real user count (keep it honest; "around 60" is fine, inventing "10,000 users" is not), and a problem you solved yourself. That last part is what an interviewer will ask about, and you will be able to answer it because it happened.
Pick your best two to four projects. One deep project beats five shallow ones. If you have a project you followed from a YouTube tutorial, either change it enough that it becomes yours or leave it off. Interviewers can usually tell within two questions.
For each project, link to the code or the live version. A GitHub link with a clean README does a lot of quiet work.
Internships, even short ones
An internship goes in its own Experience section above projects if it was real work, even if it was six weeks, unpaid, or at a startup nobody has heard of. Write it with bullet points that describe outcomes, not duties. "Worked on the backend team" is a duty. "Added pagination to the orders API, which was timing out for accounts with more than a few thousand orders" is an outcome. There is more on this in our post on writing bullet points a recruiter actually reads.
Training programmes where you watched videos and got a certificate are not internships. Put them under certifications, or leave them off.
The skills section
Keep it short and honest. List the languages, frameworks and tools you could be asked about in an interview without panicking. If you used Docker once to run someone else's project, it does not belong. A long skills list on a fresher resume reads as padding, and it invites questions you cannot answer.
Group them simply: Languages, Frameworks, Tools. Skip the progress bars and star ratings. Nobody knows what "Java: 4 out of 5" means, and they do not survive an ATS parse anyway.
What to cut
- Hobbies, unless one is genuinely relevant (you run a tech YouTube channel, you organised a hackathon).
- "Declaration: I hereby declare that the above information is true." This is common in Indian resumes and nobody reads it.
- Soft skills written as a list ("team player, hard-working, quick learner"). Show these in your project bullets or not at all.
- Every certificate from every online course. Keep one or two that are relevant to the role.
- Photos, unless the company specifically asks.
Format, briefly
One column, a plain font, clear headings, saved as a PDF. Fancy Canva templates with two columns and icons look nice to you and often turn to mush when an applicant tracking system reads them. The ATS-friendly format guide covers the details. One page is right for a fresher; there is no situation where a fresher needs two.
Campus placements versus off-campus
If your college has a placement cell, the resume often goes into a standard template, and you have less control. Use the space you do get on projects.
Off-campus is harder, and it is where most tier-2 and tier-3 graduates end up. Here the resume has to do more work, because there is no placement officer vouching for the batch. A few things help:
- Make one version per type of role. A frontend resume and a data analyst resume should not be the same document with a different title.
- Apply on company career pages and through referrals as well as Naukri and LinkedIn. The job boards get flooded within hours of a fresher post going up.
- Check the resume reads cleanly before sending it a hundred times. You can run it through the free resume score with no account to see what a parser pulls out of it.
If you apply widely and hear nothing, the problem is usually one of a handful of fixable things, which are covered in applied to 100 jobs and heard nothing back.
One test before you send it
Read each line and ask: could a classmate have written this exact sentence? If yes, rewrite it with something only you did, or cut it. A fresher resume with fewer lines that are all yours will get more calls than a full page of lines that could belong to anyone.