How to Write an ATS-Compliant CV for New Graduates and Those with Zero Experience
By Umut Barış Terzioğlu · · Updated
A CV without a work history is not an empty CV. It takes its evidence from other places: your degree, projects, internships, part-time jobs and volunteering. An applicant tracking system does not care where you learned a skill. It reads the document into fields such as education, experience and skills, and a recruiter then searches and reads those fields. Your job is to make the material you have easy to find and easy to read.
Put your strongest section first
Reverse-chronological order still applies inside each section, but nothing forces you to open with work experience. For most graduates this order works:
- Contact details in the body of the page, not in the header
- A two- or three-line profile that names the role you want
- Education
- Projects
- Internships, part-time work and volunteering
- Skills and languages
Some guides suggest a purely functional CV: a list of skills with no dates or employers. It tends to backfire. A parser has nothing to attach the skills to, and a reader cannot see where you used them. Keep dated entries and change only the order of the sections. Use plain headings such as "Education" and "Projects"; our guide to CV section headings lists the names that are safe to use.
Write projects the way you would write a job
A capstone, a thesis or a semester-long team project is real work. Give it the same shape as an employment entry: a title, your role, the institution, the dates, and two or three bullets that say what you did and what came of it.
Example:
Inventory forecasting model · Final-year project, Department of Industrial Engineering · Sep 2025 – May 2026
- Built a demand forecast for 300 products of a local retailer in Python (pandas, scikit-learn)
- Compared three models and documented why the simplest one was chosen
- Presented the results to the owner, who now uses the forecast for weekly orders
This gives the parser a dated entry and gives the reader the tools, the method and an outcome in one place.
Before and after
Student-style bullets describe being present. Strong bullets describe an action and its result.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Helped with the campus careers fair | Planned shifts for 12 student volunteers at a careers fair with 40 employer stands |
| Took a course in data analysis | Cleaned and analysed a 50,000-row public transport dataset in SQL for a course project |
| Worked part-time at a café | Trained four new staff on the till and the opening checklist during a 14-month part-time job |
The numbers in the table are placeholders for your own. Only write a figure you can explain in an interview; if you do not know it, describe the scope in words instead. For the first word of each line, see our list of action verbs for a CV.
Let each skill appear twice
A skills section on its own is a list of claims. When the same term also appears in a project or internship bullet, the reader sees where you used it, and a keyword search finds it in context. Before you send the CV, go through the list: if a skill appears nowhere else, add a line that shows it, or ask yourself whether it belongs there.
What to leave out
- Skill bars and star ratings: a parser gets nothing from them, and "4 of 5 stars in Excel" tells a reader very little
- School details from before university, once you have a degree
- "References available on request"
- Long lists of hobbies that have nothing to do with the role
Check what a parser reads
Paste your CV text into the quick test. It scores readability and structure out of 45 and lists the findings that cost the most points. It runs in your browser and needs no account. If you are starting from a blank page, the CV builder offers templates whose exports are checked by the same parser.