10 Resume Mistakes That Cost Freshers Their First IT Job

Recruiters spend six seconds on the first pass of a fresher resume. Almost every rejection at that stage is for one of these ten avoidable mistakes.

The top ten

• No skills section at the top — recruiters need to confirm the keyword match in seconds. Make it impossible to miss.
• Listing courses instead of projects — “completed Coursera Python” tells nothing; a built thing tells everything.
• Vague project descriptions — “built a website” vs “built a course-registration site for 200 students using React and Firebase”.
• No links — GitHub, deployed demo, LinkedIn. Recruiters click; missing links mean missing interviews.
• Listing every technology you have ever touched — five strong skills beats fifteen shaky ones.
• Spelling and capitalisation errors — “Java Script”, “Mongo DB”. One typo, instant signal.
• Personal pronouns and full sentences — bullets are concise and verb-first.
• Two-page resume as a fresher — one page, always.
• Bad PDF naming — resume_final_v3.pdf looks careless. Use Ravi-Kumar-Resume.pdf.
• No quantified impact — “improved load time by 40%” beats “optimised performance”.

The structure that works

Top to bottom: Name and contact, Skills (categorised), Projects (3 strong ones with links and metrics), Education, Achievements. Internships if relevant. Hobbies only if they are conversation hooks.

One advanced tip

Tailor the skills section per job application — reorder to match the JD’s stack. Five minutes of editing per application doubles interview rates.

What MIA students do differently

Our placement team reviews every resume before submission and runs three rounds of mock interviews. The discipline of quantifying every project shows up clearly in offer rates — it is worth borrowing the habit even if you study independently.