Graduate CV with no experience

Most graduate CVs fail at the first filter — the ATS — before a single human reads them. The reason is keyword mismatch. A graduate with a strong degree and relevant dissertation writes their CV in academic language: "conducted research into," "presented findings on," "completed module in." The ATS is reading for "Python," "SQL," "stakeholder communication," "project management," and "agile."

The fix is translation, not fabrication. The skills you built during your degree, dissertation, societies, part-time jobs, and internships are real — they just need to be articulated in the language of professional employment rather than academic achievement.

A second common failure is underselling work experience because it feels unrelated. A part-time retail job is not irrelevant — it demonstrates customer communication, prioritisation under pressure, and team coordination. A society leadership role demonstrates planning, budget ownership, and stakeholder management. Frame the real skills; do not hide the context.

Graduate CVs typically lead with education, then experience, then skills. This is appropriate when your degree is your strongest credential. As you accumulate professional experience, experience moves to the top — but for your first one to two years out of university, leading with education is correct.

Education — Degree, classification, university, graduation year. Add your dissertation title if it is relevant to the roles you are targeting. Include relevant modules only if they are genuinely technical and specific — "completed Statistics module" adds no signal; "completed Advanced Statistical Modelling module (R, Bayesian inference)" adds real signal.

Work experience — Include all work experience, not just the directly relevant. Frame every role with outcome-oriented bullets. A summer internship at a consultancy, a part-time café job, and a year as a society president all belong here. The framing transforms them: "Led weekly team briefings for a 12-person front-of-house team" rather than "Worked in a café."

Projects — For graduates targeting technical roles (software, data, engineering, design), projects are critical. Include your dissertation if it involved building something, any course projects that demonstrate practical skill, and any independent projects. For each: problem in one sentence, approach in one sentence, outcome in one sentence.

Skills — Technical skills relevant to the role. Software tools, programming languages, languages spoken, methodologies (agile, lean). Do not pad with generic skills like "Microsoft Office" unless the role specifically mentions it.

Activities and leadership — Societies, sports, volunteering, and elected roles. One line each; focus on responsibility and scale, not participation.

Length: one page. Non-negotiable for graduates. If you cannot fit it in one page, you are including too much or not editing tightly enough.

The hardest skill for graduates to apply is translating real experience into professional language without misrepresenting it. Here is the framework:

Start with the action verb that reflects real ownership: Led, Coordinated, Designed, Built, Analysed, Presented, Managed, Organised. Avoid "assisted with," "helped," "participated in" — these bury your agency.

Add the context — what you did this for, in what team or setting. Then add the outcome or scale. For academic work, the outcome might be the grade (if it is first-class or equivalent), the word count and research rigour, or the practical application of the findings. For extracurricular work, the outcome might be the number of people served, the budget managed, or the event scale.

Examples of the translation in practice:

"Helped run the finance committee" becomes "Managed a £4,200 events budget as Finance Officer for the Economics Society — tracked expenditure weekly, delivered three events within 5% of budget."

"Did my dissertation on machine learning" becomes "Designed and trained a binary classification model in Python (scikit-learn) for my dissertation — achieved 87% accuracy on held-out test set, awarded a First Class mark."

"Worked in customer service" becomes "Resolved customer escalations for a 200-seat café during peak service — handled an average of 40 transactions per hour, maintained 4.8-star Google rating over 18-month tenure."

The content is honest; the framing changes everything.

The key challenge for graduates is that your underlying experience is fixed — you cannot retroactively change your degree or internship history. What you can change is which parts of that experience you surface, how you describe them, and which keywords you foreground.

If you are applying to a technology company, foreground any Python, SQL, or technical project work from your degree. If you are applying to a consultancy, foreground your analytical and communication skills, your ability to synthesise complex information, and any client-facing work. If you are applying to a startup, foreground your initiative and independent projects.

The same real experience can be framed in multiple ways without being dishonest. A dissertation on consumer behaviour data is, for a tech company, evidence of Python and data analysis skills; for a marketing agency, it is evidence of consumer insight and research rigour.

RecastCV makes this process fast: upload your master CV, paste the job description URL, and it rewrites your bullets in the language of the role — surfacing the signals the hiring manager cares about most, grounded in your real experience. For a graduate applying to 20 or more roles, this saves hours and significantly improves response rates.