Resume format for freshers: an India guide with a sample

Use one page, one column and this order. Each part is explained below the sample.

1. Header: full name, phone, email, city and state. Add LinkedIn, GitHub or a portfolio only if there is something on it to see. You do not need a “Resume” or “Curriculum Vitae” title.
2. Career objective or summary: two lines naming your degree, the role you want and two or three skills that role needs.
3. Education: newest first. Degree with CGPA or percentage, then Class XII, then Class X, each with board or university, year and score.
4. Experience: internships, industrial training, apprenticeships and part-time work, with dates and two or three bullets each.
5. Projects: two or three, each with what you built, your part in it, the tools and what happened.
6. Skills: grouped (programming, tools, accounting software, languages), only ones you can discuss in an interview.
7. Certifications, achievements, positions of responsibility: one line each.
8. Languages: useful for customer-facing roles anywhere in India.
9. Declaration: optional on private-job resumes (see below).

A BCA graduate applying for junior developer and application support roles. Copy the structure, not the words: your own projects and numbers are what make it work.

Notice what is missing: no photo, no date of birth, no father’s name and no “Hobbies: reading, music”. The page goes to the things a recruiter can check in an interview.

CGPA or percentage?

Write the score the way your marksheet does, with the scale: “CGPA 8.2/10” or “76.4%”. If a form asks for a percentage and your university awards CGPA, use your university’s official conversion, not a formula from a website. Universities convert differently. The IBPS notification for Probationary Officers (CRP PO/MTs-XVI, 2026), for example, asks candidates to convert CGPA “as per criteria adopted by the University” and to bring proof of that criteria to the interview (IBPS notification, PDF).

10th and 12th marks

Freshers usually list them. Many campus and off-campus drives set minimum marks for Class X, Class XII and graduation, and recruiters check your resume against that line. Give the board, year and score for each. After a few years of work you can shorten them to one line or drop them.

Photo, date of birth, father’s name, marital status

A private-sector resume needs none of these. Naukri’s own help page suggests removing photos from your CV if the upload fails and attaching the photo to your Naukri profile separately (Naukri FAQ). Government and PSU recruiters collect these details in their own forms: SBI’s bio-data form for specialist officers, for example, asks for date of birth as per your school certificate, marital status and father’s name (SBI current openings). Fill them there, not on every resume. See the biodata guide for when a biodata is what the employer wants.

The declaration line

“I hereby declare that the information above is true to the best of my knowledge” is common on Indian resumes but optional for private jobs. Government forms need a declaration in their own wording. Our declaration guide has sample lines and says when to leave it out.

Length, file type and Naukri

One page for a fresher. Send a PDF unless the employer asks for Word. Naukri’s help page lists pdf, rtf, doc and docx for uploads and asks for files under 2 MB (Naukri FAQ). For the profile itself, Naukri suggests freshers write a resume headline such as “BA Graduate looking for Sales role in Retail Industry”; the headline generator helps with that field.

Plain section headings

Use Education, Experience, Projects and Skills rather than “Academic Credentials” or “My Toolbox”. Software looks for familiar headings. Our free check, for example, looks for Education, Experience and Skills headings, so put internships, training and part-time work under “Experience” instead of leaving that heading out.

1. Pick the job first. Read three or four postings for the role on Naukri, company career pages or your placement notices, and note the skills they repeat.
2. Fill Education from your marksheets. Exact scores and years; a recruiter may compare them with your documents.
3. Turn each project and internship into two or three bullets: what you did, with which tool, and what happened. Use a number only if you actually counted or measured it.
4. Write the two-line objective last, naming the role from step 1.
5. Cut to one page. Drop school-level activities, hobbies without a story and a generic skill list.
6. Export a PDF, run the free check, fix what it flags, and keep a DOCX copy for portals that ask for Word.

• An objective that fits anyone: “to work in a reputed organisation that gives me an opportunity to grow”.
• Education in a table with merged cells. It looks neat in Word, but the text can come out in the wrong order when software extracts it.
• Skills you cannot talk about for two minutes in an interview.
• Two-column templates with icons instead of the words “Phone” and “Email”: an icon is an image, not text.
• One resume for every kind of job. A bank, a BPO and a software company look for different things.
• A photo, a signature image and a full postal address taking up a third of the page.