Writing a Resume With Little or No Work Experience

The blank page is a definition problem

Sitting down to write a first resume usually produces the same reaction. There is nothing to put on it. No job titles, no achievements, no numbers.

Almost always this is wrong, and it is wrong in a specific way. The person has decided that experience means paid employment in the field they want to enter, and by that definition they have none. Employers hiring at entry level are not using that definition, because if they were they would have nobody to hire.

What they are looking for is evidence that you can work. Show up, finish things, handle a customer who is annoyed, learn something unfamiliar without being walked through it. Most people have that evidence and simply do not recognise it as material.

What counts, and how to write it

Four sources of material, in rough order of how much weight they carry.

Part-time and unrelated jobs

Retail, hospitality, warehouse work, call centres, tutoring. These are the most undervalued items on a graduate resume and among the most useful.

A hiring manager reading that you worked eighteen months in a busy restaurant learns that you can hold a shift, deal with people at their worst, and be relied on to turn up. Those are the actual failure modes in junior hires, and they are hard to assess any other way.

Write it as work rather than as a job title. "Handled the Friday and Saturday evening shift on a section of twelve tables, trained two new starters" says considerably more than "Waiter".

Academic projects

A final year project or dissertation is a real piece of work with a scope, a method and a result. Describe it that way.

Not "completed a dissertation on urban transport policy" but "analysed five years of transport usage data for a city of 400,000 to test whether a fare change had affected off-peak travel, and presented the finding to a faculty panel". The second version describes something a workplace would recognise.

Volunteering and societies

Committee roles, event organising, running a society's finances, coaching a team. These carry weight when they involve responsibility for something that could have gone wrong, and much less when they are a list of memberships.

Treasurer of a society with a real budget is a finance line. Being a member of three societies is not.

Personal projects

Strongest in technical fields, useful in most. Something you built, wrote, ran or organised because you wanted to, which nobody asked you to do.

The signal is initiative and finishing. A small project that is genuinely complete beats an ambitious one abandoned at forty percent, and interviewers can tell the difference in about two questions.

The structure that works

One page, reverse-chronological, in this order: contact details, a short summary, experience, education, skills.

The one exception concerns education. If you have just graduated and your degree is directly relevant, education can sit above experience. Once you have a year or more of relevant work, it drops below and stays there permanently.

Resist the urge to fill space. A tight one-page resume reads as someone with judgment. A padded two-page one reads as someone who could not tell what mattered, which is the specific weakness employers worry about in junior candidates.

Writing about work you have not done

The hardest part of a first resume is describing outcomes when you have not been responsible for a business result.

Two moves help. Use scale instead of impact where impact is not yours to claim. How many customers, how many hours, how large the budget, how many people. Scale is factual and it tells a reader what environment you can operate in.

Then use change instead of results. What was different because you were there. A process you tidied up, a rota you took over, a spreadsheet that replaced a paper list. These are small and they are real, and small and real beats large and vague every time.

One clear takeaway: describe what you actually did at the size you actually did it, and let the reader judge.

What to leave off

Several conventions persist on graduate resumes and none of them help.

• An objective statement. "Seeking a challenging role where I can grow" tells the reader nothing they did not assume. Use the space for a factual summary or use it for experience.
• References available on request. Everyone assumes this. It has been redundant for twenty years.
• School-level qualifications, once you have a degree, beyond a single line.
• Skill rating bars. A graphic claiming you are four stars at Excel is a claim with no evidence and it parses as nothing.
• A photograph, in most markets. Some countries expect one, many actively discourage it, and where it is not standard it introduces bias without benefit.
• Long interest lists. One line is fine if something is genuinely distinctive. Reading, socialising and travelling are not.

The experience paradox, and how people actually get through it

Entry level roles asking for two years of experience are a real and widely mocked problem. They are also less absolute than they look.

Requirements lists are usually a wish rather than a specification, and applying at around seventy percent of what is listed is normal. The people writing them know this.

What moves the odds more than any resume edit is a person inside the company. Referred candidates are treated differently from cold applications, and at entry level the referral often comes from somewhere ordinary: a course mate a year ahead, a former colleague from a part-time job, an alumni contact who answered a message.

Applying to smaller employers also changes the maths. They receive fewer applications, they are more willing to hire on potential, and they tend to give junior people more responsibility sooner, which compounds into a stronger second resume.

Our job search builder searches the boards you choose in one go, which makes covering both large and small employers less tedious.

Which entry points are worth targeting

Some junior roles lead somewhere and some are harder to leave than to enter, and it is worth knowing which is which before you spend six months applying.

Roles that open doors tend to sit close to how the business makes money or close to its data. Sales development, analytics, operations coordination and customer support at a technology company all put you next to people whose jobs you might want next. Our data analyst guide covers one of the most common of these routes.

Be more careful with roles that are narrow by design and rarely broaden. If a job would teach you one internal system and nothing transferable, the second year is worth much less than the first.

The cover note does more work here than later

Later in a career a cover letter is often skimmed or skipped. At entry level it is frequently the only place you can say the thing your resume cannot.

Your resume says you worked in a shop and studied geography. It cannot say why you are applying to this particular company, what you understand about what they do, or what you have already taught yourself in preparation. Those are the things that separate two candidates with identical qualifications.

Keep it short, four paragraphs at most. Name something specific about the employer that is true and not from their homepage. Say what you have done that connects to the work, even if it is small. Say plainly what you are missing and what you are doing about it, because naming a gap yourself gets it asked about once instead of hovering over the whole conversation.

Avoid the template that opens with "I am writing to apply for the position of". The reader knows. Start with the sentence you would use if you bumped into the hiring manager and had thirty seconds.

The first ninety days matter more than the offer

One thing worth knowing before you take the first thing offered. At entry level, what you learn in the first year determines your second job more than the title on your first one does.

So when you are choosing between offers, or deciding whether to hold out, weigh who you would learn from and what you would be trusted to own. A junior role reporting to someone experienced who reviews your work is worth considerably more than a slightly better paid one where nobody has time to look at what you produce.

Ask in the interview who you would work with day to day and how feedback happens. The answers are informative, and asking marks you as someone thinking past the offer.

Questions people ask

What do I put on a resume with no work experience?

Part-time or unrelated jobs, academic projects, volunteering with real responsibility, and anything you built or organised yourself. Describe each by what you did and at what scale rather than by its title.

Should an entry level resume be one page?

Yes. One well-edited page is the right length for the first several years and reads as better judgment than a padded second page.

Does unrelated work experience help?

More than most graduates expect. It evidences reliability, working under pressure and handling people, which are the qualities that actually go wrong in junior hires.

Should I apply if I do not meet all the requirements?

Yes, at around seventy percent. Requirement lists are wish lists, and the people who wrote them know it.

Do I need a cover letter for entry level roles?

Where the application allows one and you genuinely want the job, yes. With a thin resume, a short specific note is often the only place you can explain why you are applying to this employer rather than any employer.

Related reading

• The Career Change Resume: Making Unrelated Experience Count
• Resume Mistakes That Actually Cost You Interviews