A recruiter working a junior requisition is reading a lot of near-identical profiles: same degree, same coursework, same three tutorial projects. Screening becomes a search for anything that differentiates. Four things reliably do.
Evidence that you finished something
The strongest signal in a junior profile is a completed, deployed, working thing — with a link. Not a tutorial follow-along; something with a decision in it you can explain.
Scope matters far less than completion. A small tool that a handful of real people use beats an ambitious half-built platform, because finishing is the rarer skill and the one being hired for.
Specificity in the stack
“Familiar with cloud technologies” tells a recruiter nothing and matches no search. “Deployed a FastAPI service on ECS with a Postgres backend; wrote the Terraform” is specific, searchable, and gives an interviewer somewhere to start.
Name versions, name services, name what you did versus what the team did. Being honest that you handled one piece of something larger reads as credible, not weak.
A resume that a parser can read
Single column, standard headings, real text for skills, dates as Mar 2024 – Present. Most early-career resumes are lost to formatting rather than to content, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
The ability to explain your own work
Screening calls frequently end at “walk me through this project.” A surprising share of candidates cannot — they can describe what the project does but not why it is built that way, what broke, or what they would change.
Prepare three minutes on each project: the problem, the approach, the thing that went wrong, what you would do differently. That last part is what distinguishes someone who built something from someone who followed instructions.
What matters less than you think
Grades, beyond a rough threshold. Degree institution, at most employers. The precise count of technologies listed — an honest six beats a padded twenty, and the padding gets found in the first technical conversation.
What matters more than any of it
Whether anyone advocates for you. A recruiter who has placed candidates with that hiring manager before can get your profile read on the day it is submitted. That is not a substitute for the four signals above — it is the mechanism that gets them looked at.
