A first resume is one page, built from what the student already has: school, activities, coursework, and any work-like responsibility, paid or not. Hiring managers for entry-level roles do not expect experience — the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose Occupational Outlook Handbook tracks what entry work actually requires, shows most first jobs need no credential beyond a high school education and reliability. What they read for is whether the applicant can assemble a clear, error-free page, because the resume is the first work sample they will ever see from the student.
Here is how to build that page section by section, what counts as experience when there is none, and the mistakes that quietly sink young applicants.
What Goes on a First Resume With No Job History?
Nearly every high schooler has resume material; they just do not recognize it because it was unpaid. Babysitting, lawn mowing, tutoring a neighbor, running a club's social account, stocking shelves for a family business, volunteering weekly at a food pantry — all of it counts, described as work. The bar is regularity and responsibility, not a paycheck.
The page has five parts, in this order for most students: contact information, a short objective or summary (optional but useful on a first resume), education, experience and activities, and skills. Bold section headers, one readable font, generous margins, and absolutely no more than one page. Nobody has ever been hired for a two-page teenage resume.
- Contact block. Full name, phone, city and state, and a plain professional email address. No street address is needed anymore, and joke email handles go — a new free address takes two minutes.
- Education. High school name, expected graduation date, GPA if it is strong, and any honors, AP, or career-tech courses relevant to the job.
- Experience and activities. Babysitting, volunteering, clubs, sports, side gigs — each with two or three bullet points saying what the student did and how often.
- Skills. Concrete and checkable: food-handler card, CPR certification, specific software, languages spoken, cash handling, social media scheduling. "Hard worker" convinces no one; "trained three new members on the register" does.
How Do You Describe Babysitting So It Sounds Like Work?
The trick is the same one professional resume writers use: action verbs plus scale plus regularity. "Babysat" is a word; "Cared for two children ages 4 and 7 on weekly basis for two years, including meals, homework help, and bedtime routines" is experience. The verb opens the line, the numbers give it weight, and the duties translate into workplace skills — scheduling, feeding, supervising, resolving conflicts.
The same move upgrades everything. "Member of debate club" becomes "Research and argue weekly debate topics; placed second in regional tournament, March 2025." "Volunteered at church" becomes "Set up and staffed monthly community dinners for 80+ guests, 2024–2025." Numbers of people, hours, months, or dollars are what make a line believable, and honest small numbers work fine — a hiring manager reading a sixteen-year-old's resume is comparing it to other sixteen-year-olds, not to executives.
What Should Never Go on a Student Resume?
A few omissions matter as much as the inclusions, and some are safety questions as much as style ones.
- A photo. Standard US practice is no photo; employers do not want them, and they invite bias problems.
- Full street address or birthdate. City and state are enough. Identity theft starts with exactly this oversharing, and nothing on the page requires it.
- Social media handles, unless the account itself is the portfolio — a photography feed being used to apply to a photo job, for instance.
- Anything untrue. Inflated claims collapse in the interview or the first week on the job, and a first resume travels small circles in a town.
- Fifth-grade accomplishments. The window is roughly high school; earlier awards read as padding.
How Do You Fit the Resume to the Job?
Ten minutes of tailoring per application beats fifty identical copies. The student rereads the posting, finds the three duties or qualities it stresses — weekends, customer service, teamwork — and makes sure the resume's bullet lines speak to those, in the employer's own words where honest. A camp counselor application leads with childcare and first aid; a grocery application leads with reliability, cash handling, and availability.
The same resume then powers everything else: most application forms ask for the same material, the interview answers come from its bullet points, and a teacher writing a recommendation sees the student's full picture at a glance. One good page, updated twice a year, serves the whole high school career.
File format deserves thirty seconds of care: submit a PDF unless the posting asks otherwise, because word-processor files reflow oddly on other machines, and name the file something a manager can find again — first name, last name, the word resume. A file called document4.pdf has been closed unread more times than any teenager would believe.
How Do References Work When You Have Never Worked?
References on a first resume are usually listed as "available on request," and the real list lives with the student: a teacher, a coach, a club adviser, a pastor or scout leader, a neighbor whose lawn was mowed all summer — adults outside the immediate family who have watched the student be responsible and will answer a phone call. Two or three is plenty.
The etiquette step that separates strong applicants: ask each adult first, in person or by message, and tell them what jobs are being applied for so their praise lands on target. An adult surprised by a reference call gives a flat one; an adult prepared gives a warm, specific one.
How Can Parents Help Without Writing It?
Parents make excellent editors and terrible authors. The productive roles: brainstorming the forgotten material (the family remembers the lawn clients and the pantry shifts), proofreading for typos and consistent dates, and running a five-minute read-aloud test — anything that cannot be read aloud smoothly cannot be read smoothly by a manager either. The resume's sentences should be the student's; that voice is what shows up at the interview, and the page and the person need to match.
Done honestly, the first resume takes an evening and pays for years. Every later version is an edit of this one — the verbs and numbers just get bigger.
For more context, read How to Prep for a First Job Interview as a Student.
For more context, read how to use a planner.
For more context, read Why Public Speaking Practice Starts in Middle School.