Biodata format for a job: what a screener checks, row by row

Who asks for a biodata, and what they do with it

Three different people arrive at this page and all three were told the same word. One is a fresher who has been asked to bring a biodata to an interview at a firm with nine employees, and has no idea whether that means the sheet his college made him fill in or something else entirely. One is working through a form — for a state board post, a hospital, an aided college, a co-operative bank — where a line near the bottom says attach biodata and nothing on the form explains what that is. And one was sent a smart-looking template by a cousin who works in an office, and has begun to suspect it is the wrong document altogether. All three need the same page, which is the one explained below.

So it is worth being plain about which document that is, because this site has two of them and they are not interchangeable. A job biodata is what a small employer, a school or college office, or a government-adjacent form asks for: a one-page personal record carrying your father’s name, your date of birth, your qualifications with their years and marks, whatever work you have done, and a signature at the bottom. A résumé is a different thing, written for a company that reads applications through software before a person ever opens one, and organised around what you achieved rather than around who you are. If your application goes through a careers portal or a job site, you want the résumé builder and not this page — it is free as well, and the link is at the foot of this guide. If you were handed a form, or told to bring a page, read on.

What a job biodata is for is verification rather than persuasion, and almost everything about its shape follows from that. Whoever picks it up is checking a short list of facts against what you said on the phone and against the certificates you will be asked for later: are you old enough for the post, did you finish the qualification you are claiming, in which year, under which board or university, and can you be reached on the number printed at the top. That is why the page is laid out as labelled rows rather than as paragraphs, and it is why an unanswered row does more damage here than a weak sentence ever does on a résumé. A missing row reads as something withheld, even when it was only forgotten.

The example below is a finished document rather than a blank form: Rohit Deshmukh, twenty-three, a B.Com from K.T.H.M. College in Nashik with six months as an accounts intern behind him, applying for the post of Accounts Assistant. Everything that follows explains a decision that page makes, block by block, and the same document opens in the maker at the end so you can type over it instead of starting at an empty screen. Where there is a genuine judgement to make — a percentage against a CGPA, a gap year, whether the Category row belongs on your form at all — both sides of it are set out rather than left to taste.

The job biodata, block by block

Top to bottom, in the order the page above is laid out. Each block is here because somebody screening the document needs something from it, and where a block carries a real decision, the decision is spelled out instead of being left to taste.

1. 01

   The photograph

   A passport photograph, 35×45mm, pasted at the top right of a printed page or placed into the document itself.

   This is the one document where the photograph is not decoration. A biodata is asked for by people who are going to meet you — a shop owner, a clinic administrator, a school clerk — or by a form printed with an empty box and the word Photograph beneath it, and both use the picture to match a face to a file that may sit on a desk for weeks. 35×45mm is the Indian passport size, which is what any studio hands you when you ask for passport photographs, and it is the size those boxes are cut for.

   Plain background, white or light grey. Head and shoulders, face square to the camera, eyes open, no cap, no dark glasses, no beauty filter, and taken within the last six months rather than lifted off your college identity card. A cropped group photograph is always recognisable as one, because somebody else’s shoulder is still in the corner of it, and on a page whose entire job is to look orderly that registers as carelessness before a single row has been read.

   If the form says paste photograph, paste it — print the biodata, use a glue stick rather than a staple driven through your own face, and if the instruction says the photograph must be attested, take it to whoever attests before you take it anywhere else. When you are emailing the page, the photograph belongs inside the PDF and not attached beside it as a separate file that gets lost on the first forward. The maker leaves a photo frame in place on this document, empty, waiting for your file; nothing else on the page has to move to accommodate it.

2. 02

   The header: your name, and the post you are applying for

   Your name in full, then one line giving your qualification and the post applied for, with a phone number, an email address and your city under it.

   The subtitle line is the most useful thing on the page and the one most biodatas leave off entirely. Rohit’s gives his degree with its year and then the post he is applying for, which tells a reader in half a second what he holds and what he wants. When a small firm has eleven pages on a desk, that line is how they get sorted into two piles; a biodata that says nothing but a name at the top has to be read before it can be filed at all, and the reading is precisely what you are competing for.

   Write the name the way your certificates write it. If your marksheet says Rohit Anil Deshmukh and you sign yourself Rohit Deshmukh, put the certificate form on the page and sign the way you sign. A mismatch between the biodata and the marksheet surfaces months later at the document-verification stage, when it is slow and expensive to fix and when nobody remembers it was only a middle name.

   The phone number should be one you will actually pick up between ten and six, and the email should be one you open. An address built out of a nickname and three digits is not a moral failing, but it is the address a clerk will mistype into a spreadsheet, and a plain first-name-and-surname address costs nothing to create. The city goes at the top, not the whole address; the permanent address has a row of its own further down and does not need to appear twice.

3. 03

   Personal Details: the eight rows

   Father’s name, mother’s name, date of birth, gender, marital status, nationality, languages known and permanent address.

   These eight are the rows an Indian employer’s form actually asks for, in roughly the order it asks for them, and they are the clearest reason a biodata looks nothing like a résumé. A résumé would never carry a father’s name; a biodata without one looks incomplete to the person checking it, because that row is what ties you to the family records the rest of your paperwork is built on. Use Shri, Sau. or Smt. if the rest of your documents are written that way and drop them if they are not — either is normal, but be consistent down the column rather than honouring one parent and not the other.

   Give the date of birth and never the age. Rohit’s page carries 14 August 2003 and does not say twenty-three anywhere, which is deliberate: an age is correct on the day the PDF is saved and wrong within a year, and a file that lies in an office for eight months with a stale number in it is a file with a visible error in it. Write the month as a word rather than as a number — 14 August 2003, not 14/08/03 — because a numeric date is read one way in one office and another way in the next, and that ambiguity is free to avoid.

   Languages known is the row most often filled in uselessly. Marathi, Hindi, English is a list. Marathi, Hindi, English (read, write, speak) is information, and it is the difference between the clerical post that involves drafting Marathi correspondence coming to you or going to somebody else. Where your competence is uneven, say so: Hindi (read, write, speak) · English (read, write) is an honest and extremely common line and it costs you nothing. The permanent address goes in full with the PIN code, because a government-adjacent form usually wants to know which district you belong to, and a half address invites a phone call you would rather not receive.

4. 04

   The Category row: when it belongs on the page and when it does not

   SC, ST, OBC, EWS or General — a row that is compulsory on some forms and simply unnecessary on others.

   Rohit’s biodata does not carry a Category row, and that is a choice this document makes rather than an oversight. The row sits in the maker’s Add section list, under Category & ID, one click from where you are: it belongs on some documents and not on others, and only the person writing knows which of the two this is. Nobody should have a caste category filled in for them by a template they downloaded.

   Put it in when the form asks for it, and put it in properly. Government and government-adjacent recruitment — state and central boards, public sector undertakings, municipal bodies, aided schools and colleges, co-operative banks — allots posts against category-wise vacancy lists, and your category is what decides which list your application is counted in, which cut-off is applied to you, and frequently whether an application fee is payable at all. Leaving the row blank on such a form does not keep the question open: it gets the application processed as General, which is usually not what was intended and is not always reversible later. Write the category exactly as your certificate writes it, including Non-Creamy Layer where the certificate says so, and add the certificate number and the issuing authority if there is room on the page, because that is the next thing the office will ask you for.

   Leave it out when nobody asked. A trading firm, a clinic, a workshop or a small manufacturing unit has no vacancy list to count you against and no use for the row, and a private employer who did not ask for it does not need it volunteered. That is not advice to conceal anything — if a later form asks the question you answer it, and a caste certificate is a document you are entitled to use wherever it counts. It is simply the rule that governs the whole page applied to one row: a job biodata carries what the person reading it needs in order to act, and nothing beyond that.

5. 05

   Education: the list, and a year on every line

   Every qualification you hold, most recent first, with the institution, the board or university behind it, the years, and the marks.

   Rohit’s education runs downwards from the B.Com to the higher secondary to the school-leaving certificate, which is the order to use: the reader wants your highest qualification first and stops as soon as they have what they came for. Each line names the institution and the authority behind it — the college with its university, the two school lines with the Maharashtra State Board — because a college name on its own means nothing outside its own district, and the board or university is the part that makes the qualification checkable at all.

   The single most common defect in a job biodata, and the one that makes a page unusable to whoever is screening it, is a qualification with no year against it. A degree with no year does not say whether you finished last month or in 2014, which is the first thing a screener needs and the thing that decides whether you count as a fresher in the first place. Give both years for a multi-year course and the single exam year for a board qualification, and do it on every line, including the ones whose marks are not worth printing.

   Say what you studied only where it is the reason you are being considered. Rohit’s degree line names accountancy and his marks line names the taxation and cost-accounting electives he took in the final year, because he is applying for an accounts post and those two words are the whole argument for him. On the higher-secondary line the same thing is worth one word, Commerce. On the school line it is worth nothing at all. A biodata is not the place for a subject list, and a page that reprints a marksheet in full is a page that has stopped choosing.

6. 06

   Marks: percentage, CGPA, and the form that wants the other one

   The number your marksheet gives, written the way the marksheet writes it — and what to do when the form in front of you wants it the other way round.

   Write what the marksheet says, in the form the marksheet says it. If it gives 68.4%, the page gives 68.4%. If it gives a CGPA of 7.2 on a ten-point scale, the page gives 7.2 out of 10, with the scale named, because a 7.2 out of ten and a 7.2 out of four describe two very different students and only one of them is you. Do not round upwards, and do not promote yourself into a class you did not get: the marksheet is the document that will be verified, and the biodata is only a claim about it.

   When the form has a percentage column and your marksheet gives a CGPA, the honest way through is to give both and label the conversion — the CGPA with its scale, then the percentage with a note that it is the university’s own conversion. Most Indian universities publish a formula for this, and one common formula multiplies the cumulative grade point average by 9.5; others use a different multiplier, and many will issue a percentage-equivalence certificate from the examination section on request. Use your own university’s rule rather than the first one a search throws up, name it on the page in a few words, and if the post matters to you, ask the examination section for the equivalence certificate before somebody asks you for it.

   The reverse case is easier and people still get it wrong. When the form wants a CGPA and your marksheet gives a percentage, give the percentage and say that is what the university issued. Converting a percentage backwards into a grade point is a guess dressed up as arithmetic, and a guess that does not match the marksheet is a discrepancy with your signature under it. Where a qualification carries no marks at all — a certificate course recorded only as pass, or as completed — write the grade the certificate gives, or leave the marks off entirely, but keep the year.

7. 07

   Experience: what to put there when there is barely any

   Whatever paid or unpaid work you have genuinely done — an internship, an apprenticeship, a training stint, a family business, a vacation job.

   Rohit has one entry, six months as an accounts intern at a Nashik firm, and it earns its place because of what the two lines under it say rather than because of the title above them. The first names the software and the size of the business, so a reader knows the scale of what he has touched. The second names a task with an outcome attached: reconciling the monthly sales register against the cash book and preparing the working the firm’s chartered accountant filed from. Neither line contains the words responsible for, and neither claims that he was hardworking.

   A fresher with nothing at all should neither delete the section nor pad it. An apprenticeship, six weeks of industrial training, a vacation stint at a relative’s shop, the two years you quietly kept the books for a family business — that is work, and it belongs here with dates and with what you actually did. Where there is genuinely nothing, keep the heading, put in the training or the final-year project you did complete, and let the education list and the certificates carry the page. An honest thin section is survivable; an invented employer is the one thing on this page that gets telephoned.

   Two lines to an entry is the right length. Say what you did, on what, and how much of it, and leave the adjectives out. The numbers do not need to be impressive to work: forty to fifty forms a day at a common service centre is an ordinary number, and it is far more convincing to a screener than a claim of excellent computer knowledge, because it is the kind of detail only somebody who did the job would think to write down.

8. 08

   Skills: three labelled rows, not a cloud of words

   What you can operate, what you know how to do, and the practical facts about you that a small employer was going to ask about anyway.

   Rohit’s three rows are labelled Computer, Accounting and Other, and the labels are doing real work: they let somebody hiring for one specific thing find the line that answers them without reading the other two. Under Computer he names the accounting package, the spreadsheet functions he actually uses and the scripts he can type in; under Accounting, ledger entry, bank reconciliation, the two GST returns by their numbers, and basic tax deducted at source. Naming a return by its number is how a small firm’s accountant separates a candidate who has done the work from a candidate who has done a course.

   The third row is the one worth stealing. A two-wheeler licence, a willingness to relocate within the state, and the fact that he can join immediately are three answers to questions a small employer was going to ask in the first two minutes, given before they were asked. Put whatever is true and load-bearing for your post: a driving licence and its class, a shift preference, a notice period, your own conveyance if the job involves field visits, the languages you could handle a counter in.

   Do not claim a skill you would not want tested in the room. A biodata for a data-entry post that states a typing speed is a biodata that may well be handed a keyboard before the conversation goes any further, and the page is much easier to defend when every line on it is something you would be pleased to be asked about.

9. 09

   Certificates: the short list that is easy to check

   Course certificates, trade certificates and licences — one line each, with the body that issued it and the year it was issued.

   Two lines is plenty on a fresher’s page, and Rohit’s two are the right kind: a state computer-literacy certificate from the body that awards it, with its year, and a three-month accounting-software course from a named institute in his own city, with its year. Both name an issuer and a date, which is exactly what makes them worth printing. A certificate with no issuing body and no year is not a credential, it is an assertion, and a screener treats it as one.

   Print the ones the post cares about and drop the rest. A one-day webinar attendance certificate sitting beneath three real qualifications makes the page look padded rather than accomplished, and padding is the thing a screener notices first because it is what most pages do. Statutory certificates and licences outrank course certificates every time — a trade certificate, an apprenticeship certificate, a supervisor’s licence, a food handler’s certificate — because somebody else’s reputation stands behind them.

10. 10

    The declaration, the place, the date and the signature

    One sentence saying the page is true, then where and when you signed it, then your signature above your typed name.

    The declaration is what turns a list into a statement, and the wording has been the same in Indian offices for decades: that the information furnished above is true and correct to the best of your knowledge and belief. There is nothing to improve there, and attempts to improve it read badly. Under it go the place and the date — the town you are handing the page over in, and the day you are handing it over — and then your signature in ink above the typed name.

    It is conventional rather than compulsory, and it is the block that separates a biodata somebody thought about from one that was printed off a phone. A government-adjacent form will look for it, and a few offices will hand the sheet back without it. If you are emailing a PDF, leave the signature line blank and sign the printed copy you carry to the interview; if you have a clean scan of your signature, use it, but keep the ruled line underneath so there is somewhere to sign in the room.

    Change the date each time. A declaration dated four months ago on a page you printed this morning is a small, quiet tell that this is a stock document going out to everybody, and it takes one edit to avoid. The place matters slightly less, but if you have moved cities since you last used the page, change that too.

Questions people actually ask