Entry level resume examples for your first professional role

What an entry level resume should include

Most entry level resumes run one page. Recruiters spend roughly six to ten seconds on a first scan, so every line needs to earn its place. The standard sections are a header with contact details, a short summary or objective, education, skills, and experience. If your experience is thin, put education near the top and expand the skills section.

Avoid a photo in the US, Canada, and Australia. In the UK a photo is also generally omitted. Leave out references and the phrase 'references available on request' as both waste space.

• Header: full name, city and state or city and country, phone, professional email, LinkedIn URL
• Summary: two to three sentences, written for the specific role
• Education: degree, institution, graduation year, GPA if 3.5 or above
• Skills: hard skills first, then tools and software
• Experience: internships, part-time roles, volunteer work, freelance projects
• Optional: certifications, relevant coursework, capstone projects, awards

Entry level resume example: marketing coordinator

Marketing is one of the most common first roles for recent graduates. Hiring managers look for evidence of content creation, data analysis, and familiarity with tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Meta Ads Manager.

Below is a condensed example of how a bullet point should read under a university marketing society role or internship.

• Managed the society's Instagram account, growing followers from 400 to 1,200 in six months by posting three times per week and A/B testing caption formats
• Assisted in planning two campus events with combined attendance of 350 students, coordinating vendors and tracking a $2,000 budget in Google Sheets
• Drafted four email newsletters using Mailchimp, achieving an average open rate of 28 percent against an industry average of around 21 percent

Entry level resume example: software developer

For a first developer role, projects matter as much as work history. List GitHub repositories, bootcamp capstone projects, or freelance sites you built. Recruiters and applicant tracking systems scan for specific languages and frameworks, so name them explicitly.

A projects section can sit between education and experience. Each project entry should name the technology stack and describe what the project does in one line.

• Budget Tracker App | React, Node.js, PostgreSQL: built a full-stack web app that lets users log income and expenses, set monthly limits, and view spending by category; deployed on Render
• Weather Dashboard | Python, OpenWeatherMap API: wrote a script that fetches five-day forecasts for any city and outputs a formatted summary to the terminal; 120 stars on GitHub
• Contributed three bug fixes to an open-source task management library with 4,000 active users, reviewed and merged by the maintainer within two weeks

Entry level resume example: customer service and retail

Customer-facing roles are often the first jobs people hold, and the skills transfer directly to office and corporate positions. Quantify wherever you can: transactions per shift, customer satisfaction scores, upsell rates.

If you are applying for a first office role after retail or hospitality work, reframe your bullets to emphasize communication, problem-solving, and process adherence rather than product knowledge.

• Handled an average of 80 customer transactions per shift at a high-volume coffee shop, maintaining accuracy during peak periods with no cash-drawer discrepancies over six months
• Resolved customer complaints on the spot, escalating fewer than 5 percent of cases to a supervisor, which contributed to a 4.7-star Google rating for the location
• Trained three new team members on point-of-sale software and store procedures within the first month of their employment

Entry level resume example: healthcare and allied health

For roles such as medical assistant, pharmacy technician, or allied health coordinator, certifications and clinical hours are the core of the resume. List your certification body and expiry date. In the US, include your state of licensure where relevant. In Australia, note your AHPRA registration number if applicable.

Clinical placements count as experience. Treat each placement like a job entry with a title, the facility name, dates, and three to four bullets describing patient volume and procedures performed.

• Completed 200-hour clinical placement at a 120-bed community hospital, assisting nursing staff with vital signs, patient intake, and electronic health record entry in Epic
• Administered phlebotomy procedures on 40 patients under supervision with a 96 percent first-attempt success rate
• Maintained medication storage logs in compliance with state pharmacy board regulations, with zero discrepancies noted during two quarterly audits

How to tailor your resume for each application

A generic resume rarely passes applicant tracking systems. Read the job posting carefully and mirror the exact language it uses for skills and responsibilities. If the posting says 'cross-functional collaboration', use that phrase rather than 'teamwork'. If it lists Salesforce as a required tool and you have used it, name it explicitly.

Change your summary for every application. A two-sentence summary that names the company and the role title performs better than a generic objective statement. For example: 'Recent marketing graduate seeking the Content Coordinator role at Acme Co, with hands-on experience in social media management and email campaign analytics.'

Break-In Bad's resume enhancement feature can help here. Omar reads your existing resume, asks up to 20 questions about your background, and rewrites each section with language matched to the roles you are targeting. She checks every line against what you told her and keeps your original on file. The process costs 15 credits and takes about 15 minutes.