Resume with no experience: what 75 entry-level job postings actually ask for

We read 75 entry-level and 141 internship postings to see what they ask for. How to write a first job or student resume with no experience, plus five full examples.

You open a blank resume template, reach the heading that says "Work experience", and have nothing to type under it. Then you open a job ad marked "entry level" and it asks for a year of experience. It feels like a trap, and every guide you find answers it the same way: list your volunteering, your clubs, your coursework.

Some of that advice is right and some of it is habit. We wanted to know what entry-level postings really require, so we read 75 of them from the public job boards of 16 companies. Then we checked what our own ATS checker does with a short resume. This guide covers both, plus what internship postings ask of students still in school, the structure to use, and five complete examples: a high school student, an undergraduate, a new graduate, a parent returning to work and a self-taught developer.

What 75 entry-level postings actually ask for

On October 1, 2026 we downloaded every open posting from the public Greenhouse and Lever boards of 55 companies, 17,078 postings in all. We kept the ones whose title says entry level, new grad, new graduate, early career or university graduate, and merged reposts of the same role in another city or shift. That left 75 postings from 16 companies. We then read the requirements of all 75 by hand, looking for any amount of experience in months or years.

The sample has a slant. Three employers make up 47 of the 75 (Carvana with 19, SpaceX with 16, Anduril with 12), and the rest are tech companies such as Stripe, Roblox and Palantir. Almost all are in the US. A hospital, a retailer or a public agency may write its ads differently.

Here is how the 75 split:

• 21 require experience outright. Thirteen are Carvana technician ads asking for 6 months or a year of automotive work ("a minimum of 6 months of professional automotive repair experience"). The other eight ask for one to three years, such as SpaceX production technicians ("1+ years of hands on work experience") and two sales roles wanting 1 to 3 years in "a high-activity, target-driven role" or similar.
• 9 set a minimum but accept something else. Flexport's sales development roles say "Bachelor's/Associate's degree OR 1+ year of relevant experience preferred. New graduates are encouraged to apply!" Anduril's early career engineers need "3 months - 2 years of technical work to include technical internship". A Samsara new grad sales role asks for 6 months of sales experience and adds "This can be sales related coursework, sales competitions, etc." A SpaceX electrical engineering post says "internships/co-ops and club projects can apply".
• 7 set a ceiling instead of a floor. Stripe's new grad software engineers "should have no more than 18 months of professional experience (excluding internship experience)". Robinhood asks for "0-1 years" and Stripe's product manager program for "0-2 years".
• 38 name no amount of experience at all.

So the "entry level, 3 years required" ad exists, but in this sample it is rare. Outside the Carvana technician ads, 8 of 56 postings demand experience with no way around it. Most of these postings are open to someone with no full-time job behind them, as long as the resume shows something else.

What they accept instead of a job

When these postings name a route other than paid work, they name two things far more often than anything else:

All 11 postings that mention projects also mention internships, and the wording is close from one company to the next. Roblox asks for engineering concepts "through coursework, internships, personal projects, or previous roles". Anduril wants "demonstrated ownership and impact from internships, side projects, etc". Stripe's product manager program says "we care more about what you've built (through internships, personal projects, or school) than years of specific experience".

Volunteering shows up in none of the 75. That doesn't make it useless. A volunteer role where you ran something or produced something is a project, and it belongs on the page. But it gets in through what you did, not through the word "volunteer". Write it like work, with a task and a result, and it answers the same question an internship does.

"Associate" is not an entry-level title

Job seekers often filter for "associate" or "junior" when they search for a first job. On the same boards that is a poor filter. We found 155 distinct postings with "associate" in the title, leaving out senior, lead, director and counsel titles. 101 of them name a number of years of experience, 61 ask for two years or more and 12 ask for five or more. "Enterprise Account Operations Associate: 5+ years" is a normal ad there.

"Junior" appeared in only 8 of the 17,078 titles, too few to say anything about. Search for "entry level", "new grad" and "early career" instead, and read the requirements before you decide a posting is out of reach.

Still in school? What 141 internship postings ask for

If you are an undergraduate, or a freshman writing a first college resume, the postings that matter to you are internships, not entry-level jobs. So we went back to the same kind of boards. On October 2 and 3, 2026 we downloaded the open postings on the public Greenhouse boards of 37 companies, 8,297 in all, and kept the 141 whose title contains "intern", "internship" or "co-op". They come from 15 companies, and four of them (Coinbase with 27, Robinhood with 26, Lyft with 18, Stripe with 14) make up most of the sample. Then we searched the text of each one for what it asks a student to show.

Two things stand out. GPA, the number students agonize over, appears in one posting, and as a bonus rather than a bar (Duolingo: "Exceptional candidates will have... A GPA of 3.5+"). And prior experience is almost absent. Of the 7 postings that mention it, Coinbase's two name it as one option among others ("coursework, projects, or prior internship experience"); only Scale AI, Samsara's co-op and Nuro ask for it outright.

What they do filter on is enrollment and graduation date. Stripe's data analyst internship wants you "Enrolled in a quantitative Bachelor's or Master's degree program" with "the expectation of graduating in December 2027 or spring/summer 2028". Vercel: "Currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, graduating December 2027 or May 2028". The line that gets you past the first filter is your expected graduation month and year. It goes in the education entry, in those words, not in a cover letter nobody asked for.

Freshman or sophomore: read the graduation window first

Of the 66 postings that name a graduation window, 63 give a closing year: 58 close at 2028, 3 at 2027 and 2 at 2029. Three are open-ended ("December 2027 or later"). A freshman who started in fall 2026 graduates in 2030 and fits at most 3 of the 66. That is not a verdict on your resume. Summer 2027 internship lists are written for juniors. Not one of the 141 says "freshman" or "sophomore"; the 3 that mention a class year at all want juniors ("Currently in your junior year", "rising junior/senior preferred"). So a first-year student is looking for the rarer programs written for first and second years, and otherwise spending the year building the projects these postings will ask about in two years.

A first-year resume keeps its high school lines until college ones push them off: the part-time job, the club you ran, the award with a name an outsider recognizes. Put the degree you have started above them, with the expected year, so the reader knows which window you fit.

Undergraduate resume: the two lines that change

Compared with the graduate resume below, two lines are different. The education entry reads "B.S. Computer Science, University of Michigan, expected May 2028": the word "expected" and the month, because that is what 66 postings check. And the summary names your year ("Third-year statistics student who...") instead of a degree you don't yet have. Everything else, projects written like jobs and a part-time job kept for the dates, is the structure that follows.

The structure of a resume with no experience

The order changes, the sections mostly don't. From top to bottom:

1. Contact details. Name, city and state, phone, a professional email, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link if you have one. No street address, no photo, no date of birth.
2. Summary. Two or three sentences, covered below.
3. Education. It goes above experience when it is your strongest proof. Degree or diploma, school, graduation date (or expected date), and only the courses that match the job.
4. Experience. Paid work of any kind, including part-time, seasonal and family business jobs, plus internships. Each entry gets bullets.
5. Projects. Class, personal, club or volunteer projects, written the same way as jobs.
6. Skills. The tools and skills the posting names that you can back up somewhere above.

Keep it to one page. Our guide to writing a resume covers the general layout rules, and the ATS guide explains which formats applicant tracking systems read cleanly.

Skip the functional format

Several guides suggest a functional resume, which lists skills and leaves out dates and employers. It hides exactly what a first-job reader wants to see, which is where you used each skill. Keep the reverse-chronological sections above and let the projects section carry the proof. A list of skills with no place attached reads as a list of claims.

The summary

When you have no job title to lead with, the summary does that job. Write what you are (student, graduate, career returner), what you can already do with one piece of proof, and the role you want. "Hard-working and eager to learn" says nothing a recruiter can check. "Computer science graduate who built a budgeting app used by 40 classmates" does.

Why a short resume costs you in an ATS

The other trap of a resume with no experience is length. With one short job and a degree, the page can end up at 100 words.

Our own ATS checker has a rule for that. When you scan a resume built in the HiredFolio editor, a resume under 150 words loses 20 of its 100 formatting points, and the report flags it as "Resume is too short". Formatting counts for 15% of the overall score, so that costs about 3 points out of 100. The free PDF scan has no length rule, so the same resume uploaded as a PDF is not penalized for it.

The penalty is small. The reason behind it is not. A 100-word resume has very few places where the posting's keywords can appear, and keyword match is the largest part of our score. Each example below has between 150 and 200 words before the contact details. That is enough room for the posting's terms without padding.

Turn what you did into bullets

The fix for a thin resume is not adjectives. It is turning school, part-time work and projects into the same kind of bullet a job gets: an action, what it was for, and a number if one exists.

Three habits make the difference:

• Count something. Customers per shift, people on the team, pages written, users of an app, money raised. A rough number you can defend beats none.
• Name the tool. "Built a dashboard" is vague. "Built a Google Sheets dashboard with pivot tables" gives an ATS and a reader something to match.
• Give projects a title and a date. "Inventory tracker, Python, spring 2026" reads like work. "Various projects" reads like filler.

Five resume examples with no work experience

The five people below are invented. Their sections, wording and length are the point: copy the shape, not the numbers.

High school student, first job

The concession stand is a volunteer role, filed under projects and written like a job. The availability line answers the first question a store manager has.

Undergraduate, applying for a summer internship

The expected graduation line is the first thing an intern recruiter reads, and the course names repeat the posting's tools. The campus job keeps a bullet for a reason: our editor scan's bullet check reads only the Experience section, so a resume whose only bullets sit under Projects loses 10 formatting points and is flagged "Experience lacks bullet points". One bulleted line under Experience, even a desk job, avoids that.

College graduate, first full-time job

The internship goes under experience, because that is where the postings count it. The barista job stays even though it has nothing to do with marketing: it shows three years of showing up, in one line.

Career returner after time at home

A returner is not starting from zero, and the resume should not hide the gap. One dated line names it, and the unpaid work during it is written exactly like a job.

Self-taught developer, no degree in the field

Projects go first here because they are the proof. That matches the tech postings in our sample, which ask for programming "through side projects or classwork" and treat a degree "or equivalent practical experience" as interchangeable.

Tailor it to one posting before you send it

The same resume sent to fifty postings matches none of them well. Before each application, read the requirements and check that every term you can honestly claim appears on your page, in the posting's own words. If the ad says "customer service", don't write "client care". If it names a tool you have used, put that tool in a bullet, not only in the skills list.

That check is what our free ATS checker does: paste the job description, upload your resume, and it scores the match and lists the keywords it could not find. With a first resume, the missing list tells you which project or class to describe in more detail.

If you are applying to internships first, an internship application tracker keeps the deadlines in one place.

A resume for a part-time job

You need one. The store or café may hand you a paper form as well, but the resume is what you paste into the online application and what the manager has in hand when they call. Three things change compared with a full-time application:

• Availability goes at the top. A manager hiring for weekend shifts reads that line before anything else. Days, hours, and from when: "Available Saturdays 9 to 5 and Tuesdays and Thursdays 4 to 7, starting June 1".
• The title names the job, not your ambition. "Crew member, weekends" beats "Future marketing professional".
• Every job counts, including babysitting, lawn care and a family business, each with a number.

If you are 14 or 15, write the availability line so it fits the law before the manager has to tell you. The federal rule for non-farm jobs, 29 CFR 570.35, limits work to "Not more than 3 hours in any 1 day when school is in session, including Fridays", "Not more than 18 hours in any 1 week when school is in session", "Not more than 8 hours in any 1 day when school is not in session", "Not more than 40 hours in any 1 week when school is not in session", and "Between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. in any 1 day, except during the summer (June 1 through Labor Day) when the evening hour will be 9 p.m." Your state may add rules of its own, so check before you promise hours. Maya, a high school junior, is 16 or 17 and outside these limits, so "weekends and two weekday evenings" works for her. At 15 the same line would promise hours the law forbids; "Saturdays 9 to 5, Tuesdays and Thursdays 4 to 7" fits.

"Fresher", "new grad", "entry level": the words to search

"Fresher" is the everyday word in India and much of South Asia for a graduate with no work experience, and a fresher resume is the college graduate resume of this guide under another name: education first, projects written like jobs, one page, the posting's own terms. The word to search depends on where the board is. In the 8,297 titles on the 37 tech boards we downloaded, "new grad" appears 29 times, "early career" 8, "university grad" 5, and "fresher" and "entry level" not once. On those boards, search "new grad" and "early career"; on Naukri or LinkedIn India, search "fresher". The entry-level ads in our first count came from other boards, car dealers and manufacturers among them, so the right search word also depends on the industry.

Frequently asked questions

Should I put my GPA on a resume with no experience?

Include it if it is strong or if the posting asks for it. Only 3 of the 75 postings we read mentioned GPA at all, so leaving out an average one costs you little.

Should a college freshman keep high school on the resume?

Yes, until college entries replace them. A first-year resume with a high school job, a club you led and a named award is a full page of proof; by junior year those lines have usually given way to coursework, projects and campus jobs. The degree you have started goes above them, with its expected year.

Is a student CV the same as a resume?

In the US, no: a CV is the long academic document with publications and teaching, and employers want the one-page resume described here. In the UK, Ireland and most of Europe, "CV" is simply the word for a resume, and the same one-page rules apply. France adds conventions of its own, covered in our guide to the French CV format.

How long should a resume with no experience be?

One page. Aim for at least 150 words of real content, which is the threshold our checker uses, and stop when every line is proof for the job you want.

Can I apply if the posting asks for one year of experience?

Often, yes. In our sample, 9 of the 30 postings that set a minimum also named a substitute, such as a degree, vocational training, an internship, coursework or club projects. Apply when you can show the work the requirement is meant to prove.

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