Graduate Resume sample

A resume is a bridge that stands in the middle of you and the job you’re applying for. It’s a document that holds valuable details of your background, educational qualification, skills, accomplishments and prior work experience.

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An ideal resume is one which should answer the queries your employers might be having before hiring you. Every company would want to know more about their employees during the interview process. If an employer has questions such as “Will this person meet the needs of the company?” or “In what ways will this person contribute to the company?” in his/her mind, your resume should resolve those queries while they are looking at your resume. In short, your resume should speak for yourself.

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Do you remember those school days of yours where you’d sit preferably in the last bench of your classroom and stare outside the window while the class was still going on? What would you think about while looking at the sky from your seat for hours and hours? Probably you’d think of becoming a painter or a writer. Maybe you’d play your favourite scene from a movie in your mind, where the protagonist is walking down the hallway of a company after bagging a job in his dream company, and wish to be that protagonist one day.

We know life is not ideal but if you’re thinking that you’re not good enough for the job or the company you had dreamt of, it’s to rethink. You’re not one of the selected candidates because the resume that you have built for yourself might not be up to the mark. Let’s break it down to you.

Now, let’s come to the part where we deconstruct an ideal resume for your better understanding. If you want to build your ideal resume, take notes of the following points carefully.

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Choosing a resume template can be tricky. Go for such a resume template design that looks good and feels readable at the same time.

• Your resume should ideally be contained in 1 page only and can be stretched to a maximum of 2 pages. Making your resume unnecessarily lengthy is a big NO.
• Write your resume in a professional font style such as Times New Roman with a font size of 10 to 12.
• However, do not indulge in using any special fonts, graphic designs or colouring in the template of your resume.

Follow these steps if your resume is 3 to 4 pages long. If your resume is longer than that, then probably you’d need to make a new one.

• Remove less important words from your resume. Having too many descriptive and lengthy words will not only increase the length of the resume, but will make your resume unattractive and boring.
• Remove unnecessary content which is irrelevant to your job description. Putting up details on how you were as a child or what you did during the summer vacation is not going to help you get a real job.
• Frame your sentences carefully so that your lengthy sentences are cut down to half. Instead of writing “sales went up from $20,000 to $80,000”, write “sales went up 200%”. If you've previously written “the largest bank of Canada” or “the financial status of the company”, modify your sentences to “Canada’s largest bank” or “the company’s financial status”. In this way, your resume length will shorten.

• Contact information
• Summary
• Education
• Work experience (including internships)
• Leadership and Volunteering Experience / Position of Responsibility
• Professional Development & Certifications
• Awards and Honours
• Projects
• Skills

Now, coming to the body of the resume, there are a few points to keep in mind if you want to make your resume a work of art!

• Your resume should have plenty of white space. Don’t make one heading climb onto the next one
• Do not make any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.
• Break your lengthy paragraphs with bulletins so that employers don’t get lost while reading through the resume.
• Start writing the numeric values instead of spelling out the numbers. For example, write 20% instead of writing twenty percent.

Since you’re a graduate, your resume should ideally contain the following!

• Along with your name, give your phone number, a valid email address, your present residing city and state. Please mention these details on the top of your resume so that the recruitment members can easily see it.
• You can also mention your LinkedIn profile if you have any. In recent times, having a LinkedIn profile has become a necessity. Most employers would like to run a background check on you through your LinkedIn profile before hiring you.
• However, do not go into detail describing your age, city where you’re originating from, your nationality or religion. This is irrelevant information that the interviewer would not want to see.
• Also, avoid giving a photograph or a signature of yourself in the resume. No matter how good you think you look, it’s a botheration for the interviewers to see your smiling face on top of your resume. The company will hire you if you fit their job profile, not on the basis of how you look on your Facebook profile.

A summary is a two to three line description where you talk about the skills you’re most confident about, reasons for applying to the job and where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years.

• Write your resume strictly in third person because making your resume unnecessarily can make your interviewer a little uncomfortable.
• For example, “Award winning college business graduate, with experience in two finance internships at two top firms, as well as experience in analysing financial statements for businesses, seeks a position with a top company” is an ideal summary for a graduate's resume.

However, do not make the summary too long and do not provide an overall description of the job you’re applying for.

• Follow a reverse chronological format while listing down your educational history. For example, go from the most to the least recent.
• Give a brief mention of the subject related awards, leadership positions, relevant course works and student foreign exchange program (if any).
• However, avoid giving your CGPA scores you had got in your 8th or 9th standard and TOEFL score too.

• An ideal work experience description should be summed within 5 bulletins.
• List down your work experience from the most to least recent (reverse chronological format) and mention the start and end month and year along with the company name.
• While constructing this section, ask yourself a few questions, such as what are the most important responsibilities you’ve ever had, or who are the most important clients you’ve worked with.
• Focus on your accomplishments, utilizing keywords from the job description and drawing a connection of your work experience with your future goals. Having a result oriented job description will give your employer a better understanding of your capabilities.
• If you’ve previously interned for a company, no matter how big or small the company is, give a brief description of that company and your role.
• However, avoid using too much professional or technical terms so that any layman can understand.

Try to quantify and add accomplishments along with your position of responsibility. For example, “Member of Finance and Investment cell”.

You can include the professional certificate courses which you did both online and offline, relevant to your job profile

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You can include the awards you got in your college or during a professional course, relevant to your job profile.

You can list down the projects you were a part of during your college days or while doing a professional course, relevant to your job profile.

Fix your focus on highlighting your hard skills such as your proficiency in a foreign language (if you know any), your typing speed, machine operations and computer programming that you may know.

Soft skills or interpersonal skills such as time management, leadership, team work, communications will be justified through your work experience. It’s not a necessity to mention soft skills separately.

Don’t give this section if you do not know any foreign languages. Knowing basic Hindi and English languages do not require any specific mentioning on your resume.

Soft skills or interpersonal skills such as time management, leadership, team work, communications will be justified through your work experience. It’s not a necessity to mention soft skills separately.

• Do not make any spelling mistakes or any grammatical errors. Such seemingly trivial mistakes can literally make you lose the job even if you fit the job profile perfectly. Use Grammarly.
• No personal information should be shared in your resume other than your name, contact details including your phone number, email address, your current city and state, your Linkedin profile.
• Do not provide information like your religion, caste, political affiliations and beliefs, and nationality in your resume.
• Do not give a photograph and a signature in the resume.
• When you are listing your educational history and work experience in your resume, make sure you put the latest one first and the older ones later.


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