Published: 16 September 2026 · By: Resumity Editorial Team · Dateline: Bengaluru

TL;DR: Unstop’s 2026 report is the campus-hiring headline: most companies say they are recruiting; most students in the survey were still unplaced. Off-campus, your resume has to do the work a placement cell used to do. Projects first, parseable file, JD-matched skills, no photo, no invented internships.

If you are a 2025 or 2026 graduate, the mood on X this month is job threads: internships in Bengaluru and remote India, PPO notes, “apply early.” The quieter data is less kind.

The Unstop Talent Report 2026 (37,000+ students, 500+ HR leaders) found 87.8 percent of companies actively recruiting and 85 percent of engineering students, 84 percent of undergraduates, and 74 percent of MBA students in that study still unplaced. Access is uneven: heavy-recruiter campuses convert far better. 73 percent of undergraduates wanted more than ₹5 LPA; 40 percent got it.

foundit’s July 2026 tracker (Business Today, 6 August) said traditional IT’s share of fresher hiring fell from 32 percent (2025) to 24 percent (2026), while GCCs rose from 8 to 11 percent. foundit’s CEO Tarun Sinha said one in four entry-level IT jobs had disappeared over the year even as tech work demand grew. TeamLease HY2 2026 still showed 75 percent of firms intending to hire freshers in the second half, with IT intent down to 76 percent.

Unstop’s campus comparison also found internship-to-FTE conversion still weak: only 16 percent of organisations convert more than 80 percent of interns. A campus internship is not an offer. Put it on the resume as work, not as destiny.

You can be “in demand” as a category and still invisible as a file.

Fresher resume structure that matches 2026 screens

Header: Name, city (Bengaluru if you are there or will relocate — foundit says the hub is real), phone, email, GitHub, LinkedIn. No photo for software roles.

Headline: Java fresher | Spring Boot | SQL — not “Hardworking graduate seeking opportunity.”

Projects (treat as experience): 2–3 shipped things. Stack in JD language. Link. One number or scope line each.

Skills: Intersection of your work and the posting. Unstop notes AI/ML language in 60–70 percent of fresher JDs in 2026. If you used a model, say how you validated output. If you did not, do not list TensorFlow.

Education: Degree, institute, year, CGPA if it helps (only 21 percent of Unstop’s employers have fully dropped CGPA). If CGPA is low, do not hide the degree; lead with projects.

Internships / teaching assistant / OSS: Same bullet rules as jobs.

Do not: two columns, tables for skills, “objective” paragraphs, ChatGPT adjectives, fake company names.

Illustrative project line (use only if true):
Built a Spring Boot + React expense tracker with JWT auth; deployed on Railway; 12 documented API endpoints. Repo + live demo.
That is the shape Bengaluru reviewers asked for on 15 September — links and scope, not “passionate coder.”

Off-campus reality

Placement-cell resumes are built for a drive. Off-campus resumes are built for Naukri search and Workday. Update the portal, match the headline to the role, and tailor per JD. Deloitte says AI is now in the hiring stack at ~85 percent of Indian organisations — your PDF is being parsed, not “felt.”

Resumity: free ATS check without sign-up; AI patches you approve. We do not have a study that this “places” 85 percent of anyone. We have a product that will not invent a summer internship so a checker turns green.

The playbook is unglamorous: one honest page, one real posting, proof a human can open.