How to Write a Recent Graduate Resume (With Examples)

Most recent grads approach their resume like they're apologizing. "I know I don't have much experience, but..." That energy comes through in everything - the vague summary, the thin bullet points, the padding with irrelevant details. And it kills your chances before a recruiter even finishes your first section.

Here's what I'd tell you if you were sitting across from me: stop apologizing and start being specific. A specific resume with limited experience beats a vague one with more experience almost every time. Hiring managers reviewing entry-level applications already know you don't have ten years of work history. They're not looking for that. They want to see that you can do real work, communicate clearly, and figure things out.

Your Summary Sets the Tone

The professional summary is where most graduate resumes fall apart. People write things like "motivated recent graduate seeking an entry-level opportunity to learn and grow." That tells a hiring manager nothing. It doesn't mention your degree, your skills, or what kind of role you're targeting.

Here's one that actually works:

"B.S. in Environmental Science from UC Davis with field research experience in water quality analysis. Collected and analyzed soil and water samples across 12 sites using GIS mapping and EPA testing protocols. Seeking an entry-level environmental consulting role."

Three sentences. Degree, proof you've done real work, and a clear target. That's all a summary needs to do.

Write Bullets About Results, Not Duties

We see this constantly from grads using our builder - they write bullets that describe what the role was, not what they accomplished. "Assisted with marketing tasks" and "supported the engineering team" don't tell anyone anything useful.

Every bullet should answer two questions: what did you do, and what happened because of it? If you can attach a number, even better.

"Redesigned the intake process for a campus tutoring center, cutting average check-in time from 4 minutes to under 1 and eliminating the backlog during peak hours."

That's from a student worker position. Not glamorous at all. But the bullet shows you can see a problem, fix it, and measure the result. That's what entry-level hiring managers want to know about you.

This approach applies to everything - retail, volunteering, campus orgs, class projects. The experience itself doesn't need to sound impressive. The way you write about it does.

Use a Projects Section

If you studied anything technical - CS, data science, engineering, design - a projects section might be the strongest part of your resume. Even outside technical fields, capstone work, research, or independent projects often carry more weight than an unrelated part-time job.

Keep entries short: what you built, what tools you used, and what the outcome was. If it's live or on GitHub, link to it.

One pattern I notice from our users is that grads with two or three well-described projects get noticeably more traction than those who pad their experience section with every job they've held since high school.

For your skills section, keep it tight. List the hard skills - programming languages, tools, software - that you actually know well enough to discuss in an interview. Don't bother listing "communication" or "teamwork" as standalone skills. Everyone claims those. Instead, prove them through your experience bullets. And if you speak another language, include it with your proficiency level. That's genuinely valuable.

Stuff That Quietly Hurts Your Resume

One page. No exceptions at this stage. Stretching to two pages when you don't have the content for it looks padded, and recruiters notice immediately.

Use a single-column layout with standard headings - Education, Experience, Skills, Projects. The fancy templates with sidebars and graphics look nice in previews but often get destroyed by the screening software companies use. A clean PDF with readable formatting will always outperform a pretty template that comes through as garbled text.

Put your education section near the top. It's your strongest credential right now, so don't bury it under a thin experience section. Include your GPA if it's 3.0 or above, list four or five relevant courses, and describe your capstone or thesis if you completed one.

Drop your high school entirely - once you have a college degree, nobody needs to see it. And use a professional email address. That one sounds obvious but still comes up more often than it should.

Honestly, the single thing that makes the biggest difference at this stage is tailoring. Read the job posting. Adjust your summary to match the role. Make sure the keywords they used show up naturally in your resume. This takes maybe fifteen minutes per application and matters more than most grads realize. Twenty tailored applications will outperform a hundred generic ones.

If you want a clean starting point that handles the formatting for you, give the NoBs Resume builder a try.