What HR teams should look for when screening freshers' résumés

When screening freshers' résumés, look for evidence that the candidate has already done something close to the job: projects and internships described in specific terms, with the candidate's own part and the result, and skills backed by something you can open and check. Confirm the basics (degree, passing year, location) and notice the care taken over the résumé itself. Use grades and college name only as thresholds where the role needs them, and verify documents at the offer stage.

A fresher's résumé is a short document with little history in it, so it works best as a filter. It can tell you who to talk to. It cannot tell you who will do the job well, which is what the work task and interview are for.

What should I decide before I open the first résumé?

Write down the three or four things the person must be able to do in the first three months, and the minimum eligibility. For a junior accounts role that might be:

B.Com or equivalent, passing year 2025 or 2026
able to work from the office in the city
has used Excel for real work (formulas, not only formatting)
can write a clear, polite email

Everything else is a nice-to-have. Deciding this first stops you from shortlisting people because their résumé looks impressive in some general way, and it means two screeners reading the same pile will make similar calls.

What counts as experience on a fresher's résumé?

Freshers have no full-time jobs to list, so look at what they did instead:

Internships. AICTE's internship policy makes internships mandatory for technical education students, so you should expect to see at least one on engineering and other technical résumés. What matters is what the student did there. "Interned at XYZ Pvt Ltd" says little. "Built a stock report in Excel that the store manager used for weekly orders" says a lot.
Academic and personal projects. A final-year project, a website, an analysis, a short film, a business plan. Look for the problem, what the candidate personally did, the tools used, and what came of it.
Apprenticeships. Graduates and diploma holders who trained under the National Apprenticeship Training Scheme receive a Certificate of Proficiency at the end, and the training runs six months to a year in a workplace.
Part-time jobs, family business work and tutoring. These show reliability and dealing with customers, and they are easy to overlook.
College roles. Running a fest, a club or a placement committee involves budgets, deadlines and people.

How do I tell a real project from a copied one?

Plenty of students build the same standard projects from online courses, which is fine as practice but tells you little. Signs that a project is the candidate's own:

It names a specific problem, user or dataset, for example a real shop, a college society or a public dataset they chose.
The candidate says what they did, separately from the team.
There is a link that opens: a GitHub repository with commits under their name, a live site, a portfolio, a PDF of the report.
There is a result, even a small one ("the society now uses it to track 200 members").

When in doubt, keep the résumé in the pile and ask about the project in the interview. Someone who built it can explain a decision they made and a problem they had to fix.

How much weight should grades and college name get?

Set a grade threshold only if the job needs one, and keep it as a pass/fail cut. Colleges use different scales (CGPA out of 10, percentages, letter grades) and different conversion rules, so ranking candidates by a decimal point compares things that are not alike.

College name is the most tempting shortcut and the least specific one. A candidate from a lesser-known college with two solid, checkable projects is often a better bet for a working role than one whose résumé lists a well-known institution and nothing else.

What are real red flags, and what only looks like one?

Worth a closer look:

dates that overlap or do not add up, such as two full-time internships in the same months
a skills section listing twenty tools with no project that uses any of them
the same wording as other résumés in your pile, which usually means a shared template or coaching-centre sample
links that are broken or lead to someone else's work

Usually not a problem for freshers:

a gap of a few months after graduation, often spent preparing for exams or waiting for results
a backlog that was cleared, unless your eligibility rules exclude it
a plain, one-page design
no cover letter

What should I leave out of the decision?

Photos, age, marital status, religion, caste, family details and home town tell you nothing about whether someone can do the job. Some résumé templates in circulation still ask for them. Train screeners to skip past that information, and do not ask candidates to add it.

How do I check that degrees and marksheets are genuine?

Do this at the offer stage, for shortlisted candidates only. The National Academic Depository, run under the Ministry of Education, stores degrees and marksheets that institutions upload, and students can access and share them through DigiLocker. Ask the candidate to share their documents from DigiLocker. If their institution has not uploaded records, ask for originals and check them against the university's own verification process.

For internship certificates, a short call or email to the supervisor named on the certificate is enough.

What should happen after the résumé screen?

Move quickly to something closer to the real work. A short phone call to confirm interest, location and joining date, then a one- or two-hour work task and a structured interview with the same scored questions for every candidate. A 2022 re-analysis of hiring research by Sackett and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology put the validity of structured interviews at .42, against .19 for unstructured interviews, and work sample tests at .33.

If screening volume is the bottleneck, placement services such as recruitment.gladloop.com send a reviewed shortlist, and your team runs the interviews.

Questions people also ask

Should I reject a fresher résumé with spelling mistakes?

For roles that involve writing to customers or clients, careless errors are a fair reason to pass. For technical roles, one or two typos matter less than a project you can check.

Do online course certificates count?

They show interest and some effort. Give them weight only when the course included a graded assessment or a project, and look for the skill in the candidate's own work.

Should freshers be asked for a cover letter?

It adds work for candidates and little for you. Two or three short screening questions on the application form (why this role, a link to one piece of work) are faster to read and easier to compare.

How many freshers should I shortlist from a résumé screen?

Shortlist as many as you can give a work task and an interview to within a week. Freshers often have other processes running, and the ones with the strongest résumés tend to get other offers soonest.