Fresher resume format in India

Most resume advice online is written for the American market, and two of its rules are actively wrong for a fresher applying in India. This page is the local version: what recruiters here expect to see, what campus portals require, and which parts of the standard Indian resume template you should delete.

Marks: percentage, CGPA, or both

Include them. Indian recruiters filter on them, campus processes are built around them, and leaving them off reads as hiding something.

• Write the scale. 8.7/10 CGPA, not 8.7. A 3.6 and an 8.7 are the same student on different scales, and nobody should have to guess.
• Give both if your college reports both — 8.7/10 CGPA (82.4%). Many portals ask for a percentage specifically.
• Include Class XII, and Class X if you have space. Board, year, percentage. This is normal here and unusual almost everywhere else; for freshers it is expected.
• Do not round upward. Offer letters get withdrawn over this, and the verification step is routine.

Photo: it depends where you are applying

In India a passport-style photo on a resume is common and generally harmless — many placement cells even require one. For roles at US or UK employers, or at Indian offices of companies that run a global hiring process, a photo can get a resume set aside for bias-avoidance reasons before anyone reads it.

Practical approach: keep two versions of the same resume, one with a photo and one without, and send the one the audience expects. If you keep only one, keep the one without — it is the version that is never wrong, only occasionally less conventional.

If you do include one: plain background, current, head and shoulders, neutral expression, no group photo crops, no filters. It goes in the header beside your name, not centred above it.

The personal-details block: delete most of it

Nearly every Indian resume template ships with a table at the bottom containing date of birth, father’s name, gender, marital status, nationality, languages known, hobbies and a signed declaration. On a one-page fresher resume that block is a quarter of the document, and almost none of it helps.

• Keep: languages you actually work in, if the role involves them.
• Delete: date of birth, father’s or husband’s name, gender, marital status, nationality, full postal address, religion, category, passport number.
• Delete: the declaration and the signature line. It proves nothing and dates the document by about twenty years.
• Delete: hobbies, unless one is genuinely relevant or genuinely remarkable. “Reading, music, travelling” is the most common line on Indian resumes and it has never got anyone an interview.

The exception: if a specific portal or placement form asks for date of birth or category, fill it in on the form. That is a form field, not a resume section.

What Indian recruiters look for that guides usually skip

• Notice period and current CTC — not on the resume. For freshers this is moot, but the habit starts here: those go in the email or the portal field, never in the document.
• Your city. Location shapes shortlists heavily, and “open to relocating” on one line is worth including if you are.
• Internship and training programmes, named properly. A six-week industrial training or a summer internship is real experience — name the organisation and what you did, not just the certificate.
• Positions of responsibility. Coordinating a fest, running a club, captaining a team. In a pool where everyone has similar marks, this is often the differentiator, and it is evidence of exactly the things interviews probe for.
• English, plainly written. Not ornate. Recruiters read hundreds of these; the ones that read like a person talking get read all the way through.

Format and file

One page, PDF, real text, named firstname-lastname-resume.pdf. Standard headings, month-year dates, no layout tables. If you are applying through a campus portal, check whether it imposes its own naming or page rules — those override everything here, and the campus placement page covers that process specifically.