The categories below come from how entry-level postings are written. Separately, we counted how often each term appears across 3,518 job postings from 81 companies: the method, the per-role figures and the limits of each sample.
Keyword guide
Recent graduate roles have different ATS requirements than experienced positions: recruiters search for degree, internships, and transferable skills rather than deep technical expertise. Here are the keywords that help entry-level applications match job posting requirements.
Check My Resume Score →Write 3–4 sentences that state your degree, a relevant achievement or skill, and the value you bring. Avoid generic "seeking to use my skills." Instead, reference the role and your specific capability, e.g. "Economics graduate with data analysis internship experience at HSBC, proficient in Python and SQL."
As a recent graduate, your degree is your strongest credential. List your school, degree and major, graduation year, GPA if it is 3.5 or higher, and 2–3 relevant courses or your thesis topic. Include any academic awards or merit scholarships.
Every internship, co-op, student club role, or significant project deserves a bullet-point entry. Quantify impact: "built a sales forecasting model in Python that reduced forecast error by 18% during a 3-month internship at Deloitte" is compelling even for an intern.
List technical tools, languages, and software the job requires. Extracurriculars (team captain, nonprofit treasurer, club president) demonstrate leadership and commitment. Include them with measurable outcomes where possible.
Illustrative before and after pairs: the same work, written without and with the terms postings use
Before: weak keyword match
Did an internship and learned about the industry
After: strong keyword match
Completed 12-week marketing internship (500-person SaaS); independently built lead-scoring model in Excel adopted by marketing team, contributing to 18% improvement in MQL-to-SQL conversion
Before: weak keyword match
Worked on college projects and got good grades
After: strong keyword match
Led 5-person capstone project delivering a data dashboard for a regional hospital system (Python, Tableau); presented findings to its board; project cited in the hospital's annual digital strategy
Before: weak keyword match
Was involved in student clubs and events
After: strong keyword match
VP of the Entrepreneurship Club (320 members); organized 6 events with 40+ industry speakers, growing membership 55% YoY and securing $4K in sponsorship, the largest in the club's history
Paste your resume and any job description to see your ATS match score and the exact keywords you're missing.
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The hardest resume problem a new grad has is that everything on it sounds like a duty, not a result. The fix is one formula applied everywhere: what you did + the tool or method + a number that shows scale or outcome. Course projects, club roles, and part-time jobs all survive this treatment.
Course project: before
Completed a machine learning group project for CS course.
After
Built a churn-prediction model in Python (scikit-learn) with a 4-person team; final model beat the course baseline by 12%.
Club role: before
Treasurer of the Marketing Club.
After
Managed a $6,000 annual budget for a 120-member student club; cut event costs 18% by renegotiating two vendor contracts.
Part-time job: before
Worked as a barista while studying.
After
Trained 4 new hires and handled 200+ transactions per shift at a high-volume location while carrying a full course load.
None of these invent anything. They surface scale (team size, budget, volume) that ATS keyword matching and skimming recruiters both reward. One ordering rule: keep Education above Experience until you're roughly two years out, or until your experience is more relevant than your degree : whichever comes first. Include GPA at 3.5+, omit it below.
The most critical keyword categories for recent graduate resumes are: academic credentials (GPA, Latin honors, senior thesis, relevant coursework, Dean's List), practical experience terms (internship, co-op, hackathon, open-source contribution, volunteer work), and transferable skills (data analysis, Python, SQL, Microsoft Office, project coordination, problem-solving). Tailor keywords to each job description, even entry-level roles are searched by keyword.
You have no employment history for the parser to mine, so the keywords have to come from coursework, projects, co-ops and student club roles - and they have to be named. Write the tools you used in a senior project by product name, give each project a title and a one-line result, and put a skills section near the top. Avoid the two-column template most graduate resume builders produce.
No applicant tracking system publishes a required score. Graduate applications score lower than the experience justifies for a specific reason: postings ask for tools the graduate did use, in projects, but did not name on the resume. Before treating a low score as a lack of experience, check whether the work is written in general terms where the posting is specific.
Yes. Paste your resume and a graduate job description into the ATS resume checker for a match score and the missing terms. For graduates the gaps are usually named tools from project work, and the vocabulary of the internship or degree that the posting spells out. No signup for your first check.
Before you apply