The paradox is real, and also not as bad as it feels
Every graduate hits the same wall: a CV built around "years of relevant experience" reads as thin no matter how you format it, when you don't have any yet. The instinct is to pad it — inflate a part-time job's responsibilities, list every course you took, add hobbies that have nothing to do with anything. None of that actually helps. What helps is being specific about the experience you do have, instead of vague about experience you don't.
What actually counts as experience at this stage
- Projects, academic or personal, especially ones with a concrete output: a thesis, a built app, a research paper, a competition entry. Describe them the way you'd describe a job — what you did, what tools you used, what the result was.
- Coursework that's directly relevant to the role you're applying for, not a full transcript. A specialized elective that maps directly to the job description is worth naming; a general-education requirement isn't.
- Internships and part-time jobs, even ones outside your field. A retail job teaches real, transferable things — handling pressure, dealing with people, managing a schedule — and it's honest experience, described honestly, rather than experience you don't have described as if you did.
- Volunteer work, if it involved responsibility, not just attendance. Organizing an event is different from showing up to one.
What to leave off
High school grades, once you have a degree — they stop being relevant signal the moment a more recent credential exists. Hobbies with no connection to the role or to any transferable skill; "reading" and "traveling" tell a recruiter nothing they can use. And padding generally: a CV that gives a two-week job-shadowing stint the same weight as a six-month internship reads as unable to distinguish significance, which is its own kind of red flag.
The structural fix that matters more than content
A graduate CV without much work history has more room, not less, to make its structure and specificity count. Every issue covered in our AI-readiness guide — vague descriptions, missing detail, unclear section structure — hits a thin CV harder than a dense one, because there's less real content to compensate for a structural problem. Get the container right, and a shorter, honest CV parses and reads better than a padded one pretending to be longer.
Related guides
- What "AI-ready" actually means — the structural fixes that matter most with less content to work with
- The résumé keyword myth — why specificity beats padding at any experience level