Competition for graduate roles has intensified sharply. High Fliers Research’s Graduate Market Report found that recruitment at the UK’s 100 leading graduate employers has been cut by almost a quarter over the past three years — down 6.4% in 2023, 14.6% in 2024, and 5.1% in 2025 — with recruitment targets pointing to a further decline in 2026. A generic CV has less room to work with in a market like that, and the pressure isn’t unique to the UK — early-career hiring is tightening and shifting in different ways across every major market.
What Still Gets Graduates Shortlisted
Fewer vacancies doesn’t mean employers have changed what they’re looking for — it means they can afford to be more selective about it. A CV that clearly states your degree, relevant modules, and any placement, internship, or society leadership role still gets read closely; a generic one gets skimmed and set aside. That selectivity is showing up in how employers hire, too: NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey of US employers found 70% now use skill-based hiring for early-career roles, up from 65% the year before — meaning a CV that names specific, demonstrable skills is competing better than one built around job titles alone.
Turning a Template into an Early-Career CV
- Lead with education, not work history — degree, institution, grade (or predicted grade), and relevant modules, especially in your first two years out
- Include your placement year or internship in full, structured exactly like a job: employer, dates, 2-3 achievement-focused lines
- List university societies or leadership roles if they show responsibility — treasurer, committee member, and team captain all count
- Add a short skills section naming specific tools, languages, or software rather than generic traits
- Keep it to one or two pages — one is standard for most early-career CVs internationally, though slightly longer is accepted where a placement year adds real content
Wensa’s templates are designed by our founder and product design team — Artur Lopato has 9+ years of experience designing digital products, and every entry-level template here is built to let a thin work history still look deliberate rather than sparse.
Where Graduate Hiring Is Actually Holding Up
Growth isn’t even across sectors. The public sector and civil service, professional services, infrastructure and construction, and law have held their graduate hiring steadier than the market overall, alongside continued volume in healthcare and defence-adjacent engineering. If you’re not tied to one sector yet, these are worth a closer look before assuming the whole market is contracting equally.
A Skills-Based Structure Often Fits Better at This Stage
With limited formal work history, a skills-based CV or a combination CV often makes a stronger first impression than a strictly chronological one — both formats are explicitly recommended for graduates by the UK’s own official careers guidance.
How Graduate CV Expectations Differ by Market
Beyond the UK conventions covered above, three other markets are worth knowing if you’re applying outside the UK — or into the UK from elsewhere.
United States. US employers increasingly hire graduates on demonstrated skills rather than pedigree — the NACE Job Outlook 2026 data cited above shows skill-based hiring rising for the third year running, alongside a projected 5.6% increase in Class of 2026 hiring. A US-bound graduate CV (resume) should foreground specific tools, coursework, and project outcomes over a general education summary.
European Union. The EU’s own Europass framework provides a free, standardized CV format used across more than 30 languages for cross-border study and work applications, and it’s commonly requested by public-sector and some larger private employers in continental Europe. It’s worth having a Europass version ready if you’re applying to more than one EU country, even if you lead with a Wensa template for direct applications.
Gulf markets. As on our professional CV templates page, Gulf employers generally expect a photo and a personal details block (nationality, visa status, availability) even from fresh graduates — the opposite of UK and EU convention. A one-page CV is still standard for a fresher with no experience; the difference from UK/EU practice is in what personal information belongs on that one page, not the length.
Two Ways to Open a Graduate CV
The profile line at the top does more work than any other sentence on the page — it has to signal degree, direction, and one piece of proof, in two or three lines.
Business graduate (2:1, University of Leeds) with a 12-month placement in retail operations, seeking a graduate scheme in supply chain or operations. Led a university consultancy project that identified £15,000 in annual cost savings for a local client.
Finance graduate (First Class, University of Manchester) with a summer internship at a London asset manager, seeking an entry-level analyst role in the UAE. Eligible to relocate; visa sponsorship required.
Framing Projects and Volunteering the Right Way
With little or no paid work history, the instinct is to pad the CV with vague claims. The stronger move — for any market — is to describe unpaid or academic experience with the same structure and specificity as a job.
Society Treasurer, University Debating Society (2024-2025). Managed a £3,000 annual budget and coordinated logistics for 6 regional competitions, one of which placed top 3 nationally.
Active member of several university societies, always willing to help out and take on responsibility where needed.
The same approach works for a volunteering role, a class project, or a part-time job that isn’t directly related to your target field — name the scope, name the outcome, and let the reader draw the connection. See it applied in full in our Administrative Assistant CV example, a common first role for early-career candidates.
Personal Details: What to Include at This Career Stage
Early-career CVs carry a few conventions worth getting right, since they vary more by country than by industry:
| Detail | Guidance |
|---|---|
| Photo | Common in Germany, Austria, and much of Central Europe; generally discouraged in the UK and Ireland |
| Date of birth | Increasingly considered unnecessary or a discrimination risk in the UK, Ireland, and much of Western Europe |
| Nationality / visa status | Worth including briefly if you’re applying outside your home country, even as a graduate |
| Predicted or final grade | Always include — it’s one of the few concrete signals available at this stage |
When a job posting doesn’t specify a market convention, the more conservative option is usually the safer one.
Entry-Level CV Readiness Checklist
Every Wensa template is shaped around what hiring managers and recruiters actually look for when scanning a CV in seconds — at entry level, that means proof of potential has to be visible in the first few lines, not buried under a long education history.
Before you send your graduate CV
- Degree, institution, and grade (or predicted grade) are clearly stated near the top
- Placement, internship, or volunteering entries follow the same structure as a job entry
- Every bullet under a project or society role states a scope and an outcome, not just a title
- Personal details match your target market’s convention, not your home country’s default
- Skills section names specific tools or software, not generic traits
- CV length stays to one page unless a placement year genuinely adds a second page of content
One more thing worth doing before you send this out: run it through our free ATS resume checker to confirm nothing got lost in translation.
FAQ — Entry-Level CV Templates
Should I include my degree grade if I haven’t graduated yet?
Yes — list your predicted grade, clearly marked as predicted, until you have the confirmed result.
How do I fill a CV with almost no work experience?
Lean on education, a placement or internship if you had one, society or volunteer leadership roles, and specific skills — structured with the same detail as you’d give a job.
Is a two-page CV too long for a graduate?
Not necessarily — one page is standard for most early-career CVs, but two is reasonable if a placement year or substantial internship genuinely adds relevant content, rather than padding.
Should I list my A-levels or high school qualifications?
Only if you’re very early-career and have limited university content to fill the page — once you have a placement or a full degree’s worth of relevant modules, earlier qualifications can usually come off.
Do I need a different CV for US vs. UK vs. EU graduate applications?
The core content can stay the same, but check each market’s personal-details convention and format expectation before sending — a US resume skips the photo and personal details entirely, a UK CV does the same, and an EU application may specifically request a Europass-format CV.
