How to Write a Resume for Recent Graduates: Land Your First Job

Your resume doesn't need to look like you've been working for ten years. It needs to look like you're someone worth betting on. Most recent grads overthink this - they stress about not having enough experience and end up either padding their resume with irrelevant stuff or leaving it half-empty. Both are bad.

Here's what actually matters: showing a hiring manager that you can learn, that you've done things that required effort, and that you can communicate clearly. You have more material for that than you probably realize.

Your Education Is Your Experience Right Now

Most people list their degree, university, and graduation date, then move on. That's a waste of your strongest section. Right now, education is the most substantial thing on your resume, so treat it like an experienced person would treat their work history.

Include your GPA if it's above a 3.0. List relevant coursework - not every class, just the ones that connect to the jobs you're applying for. If you did a capstone project or thesis, describe it the way you'd describe a work project. What was the goal, what did you do, what was the outcome.

Here's an example of an education entry that actually works:

"B.A. in Economics, University of Michigan, May 2025. GPA: 3.6. Relevant coursework: Econometrics, Financial Modeling, Behavioral Economics. Senior thesis: Analyzed housing price trends across three metro areas using R and public datasets, presented findings to a faculty panel of 8."

That gives a recruiter something concrete to talk about in an interview. A bare degree line doesn't.

The Stuff You Think Doesn't Count

We see this constantly from recent grads using our builder - they leave off part-time jobs, campus roles, and volunteer work because it doesn't feel "professional enough." That's a mistake.

If you worked retail, you handled customers, managed your time during rushes, and probably trained someone at some point. If you ran the budget for a student club, that's financial management. If you organized an event, that's project coordination. The experience is real. You just need to describe it in terms of what you actually did and what the result was.

"Managed event logistics for a 200-person alumni fundraiser as VP of the Finance Society, coordinating with three vendors and staying under a $4,000 budget."

That's a real bullet that shows planning, ownership, and working within constraints. It doesn't matter that it was a student org.

One pattern I notice from our users is that people with part-time or campus experience often write stronger bullets than people with vague internship descriptions. A specific accomplishment from a campus job beats "assisted the marketing team with various tasks" every time.

Keep Your Skills Section Tight

Don't dump every skill you've ever heard of into this section. If you list twelve soft skills and eight tools you used once in a class, none of them stand out. Pick the ones that actually matter for the roles you want.

Split it into two groups. Hard skills - the technical stuff like specific software, programming languages, or tools you genuinely know. And languages if you speak more than one. That's usually enough. Soft skills like "communication" and "teamwork" are better shown through your experience bullets than listed in their own section. Everyone claims those. Few people prove them.

And be honest with yourself. If you can't hold a conversation about a tool in an interview, take it off your resume.

You don't need two pages. You don't have two pages' worth of content, and trying to fill that space will make your resume look padded. One page, single column, standard fonts, standard section headings.

This matters because most companies use software to scan resumes before a human ever sees them. Fancy templates with sidebars, columns, and graphics tend to break that software. Your resume ends up as garbled text in a recruiter's queue. Use a clean layout and save as PDF unless the application specifically asks for something else.

Put your name and contact info at the top. Use a normal email address. Add your LinkedIn if it's filled out. If it's empty, either fill it out or leave it off - an empty LinkedIn profile is worse than no LinkedIn at all.

Tailor It Every Time

Honestly, this is the thing that separates people who get callbacks from people who don't. Sending the same resume to every job posting is easy, but it shows. Read the job description. Look at what they're asking for. Then adjust your summary, reorder your bullets, and make sure the language on your resume reflects what they're looking for.

You don't have to rewrite the whole thing for each application. But swapping a few bullet points and updating your summary to reflect the specific role takes fifteen minutes and makes a real difference.

If you want a clean starting point, try the NoBs Resume builder - it's built to make tailoring easy so you're not starting from scratch every time.