How to make a résumé for freshers in India (step by step)

A fresher résumé has seven sections, ordered so the strongest evidence comes first. For most Indian freshers that is education and projects, because there is no job history yet.

1. 1

   Contact details

   Full name, phone with +91, a professional email, city, and LinkedIn or GitHub/portfolio link if you have one worth showing.

2. 2

   Summary (2 lines)

   Degree, 2–3 real skills, and the role you want. Skip the old “seeking a challenging position” objective.

3. 3

   Education

   Degree, college, university, years, CGPA. Then 12th and 10th with board, year and percentage.

4. 4

   Projects

   Your two or three best academic or personal projects, each with tools used and 2–3 bullets.

5. 5

   Internships / training

   Company, role, dates and what you did. Move this above Projects if the internship is relevant to the job.

6. 6

   Skills

   Grouped lists — languages, tools, domain skills — using the job description's wording.

7. 7

   Certifications and achievements

   NPTEL, Coursera or vendor certifications, hackathons, ranks, and positions of responsibility (club lead, fest coordinator).

Yes — in India, include CGPA and 10th/12th marks on a fresher résumé. Many campus and mass-recruitment drives set academic eligibility cut-offs, and recruiters look for these numbers first. Leaving them out often makes a recruiter assume they are low.

• Write CGPA as it appears on your marksheet: CGPA: 7.8/10. Add the percentage equivalent only if the employer asks for it.
• For 10th and 12th, give board, year and percentage: Class XII (CBSE), 2022 — 86%.
• If you have active backlogs, don't hide them in the résumé — answer honestly in the application form, which usually asks directly.
• Diploma holders: list the diploma with percentage in place of 12th.

For off-campus roles where no cut-off is stated and your CGPA is low, you can keep it but move Education below Projects so your work is read first.

Write projects and internships the same way: title line, then 2–3 bullets that say what you built or did, how, and the result. The difference is only placement — whichever is more relevant to the job goes first.

The title line carries the facts: Project name | Tech stack or tools | Month–Year. The bullets carry your contribution. In a team project, say what *you* did, not what the team did.

Non-tech freshers do the same with case studies and live projects: “Analysed 3 years of a listed FMCG company's annual reports to compare working-capital cycles; presented findings to the faculty panel.”

List only skills you can use in an interview or test, grouped by type, in the words the job description uses. Recruiters and applicant tracking systems (ATS) search for those exact terms.

• Don't rate skills with stars or bars — they mean nothing to a recruiter and can confuse ATS parsing.
• Skip vague soft skills (“team player”, “hardworking”). Show them through a project or position of responsibility instead.

A fresher résumé should be one page. If it spills over, cut the weakest project bullets, school-level achievements and generic hobbies first — not your education details.

Here is a complete fresher résumé laid out section by section. Replace every detail with your own.

PRIYA SHARMA
+91 98XXXXXX10 · priya.sharma@email.com · Pune, Maharashtra · linkedin.com/in/priyasharma · github.com/priyasharma

SUMMARY
B.Tech (Computer Science) 2026 graduate with hands-on Python, SQL and React from two full-stack projects and a 2-month web development internship. Looking for a software engineer trainee role.

EDUCATION
B.Tech, Computer Science — XYZ College of Engineering, Savitribai Phule Pune University | 2022–2026 | CGPA: 8.1/10
Class XII (CBSE) — ABC School, Pune | 2022 | 88%
Class X (CBSE) — ABC School, Pune | 2020 | 91%

INTERNSHIP
Web Development Intern — DEF Solutions, Pune | May–Jun 2025
• Built 5 reusable React components for the client dashboard used by the support team.
• Fixed form-validation bugs reported in QA and wrote unit tests for the login flow.

PROJECTS
Expense Tracker | React, Node.js, MongoDB | Jan–Mar 2025
• Built a web app to log and categorise expenses with monthly charts; deployed on Render.
• Wrote REST APIs for CRUD and JWT-based login.
Attendance Analyser | Python, Pandas | Aug–Oct 2024
• Cleaned and analysed one semester of class attendance data to flag students below 75%.

SKILLS
Languages: Python, JavaScript, SQL, Java · Tools: Git, VS Code, Postman · Concepts: DBMS, OOP, REST APIs

CERTIFICATIONS & ACHIEVEMENTS
NPTEL — Programming in Java (Elite) | 2024
Finalist, college hackathon | 2025 · Technical coordinator, college tech fest | 2024

• A generic objective — “to work in a reputed organisation” tells the recruiter nothing. Name the role and your skills.
• Two-column or graphic-heavy designs — they look modern but many ATS read columns out of order. Use a single column.
• Listing every course — pick the 3–4 subjects relevant to the job, or skip coursework if projects cover it.
• Copying a friend's project bullets — interviewers ask follow-up questions; you will be caught.
• An unprofessional email — make a firstname.lastname address for job hunting.
• Sending a .docx with broken formatting — export to PDF unless the portal asks for Word.
• One résumé for every job — adjust the summary and skills to each job description. The free ATS score checker shows which keywords you're missing.