Get the Food Service Position You Deserve With a Great Resume
When writing a resume for the food services industry, there are some key things you need to consider before getting started. These key factors are the ones that determine how your new employer is likely to rank you in the job specified. The Food Services Industry is a bit tricky, especially when one is moving from a hospitality industry to a different one looking for a promotion or greener pastures. The main importance of a resume is to capture the employer's eye; it is to express yourself in a way that will make a potential employer think of you as an asset to the company and not just another employee. In other words, you are marketing yourself to your prospective employer, and you need to prove be a worthwhile commodity.
It is important to note that approximately 85% of job seekers, either first timers or even those who have been in the Food Services Industry for a while, use skill headings rather than job titles to earn high salaries and to get more employers calling in for interviews. The majority of resumes fail because most people have a job title which deteriorates their image to their prospective employers, such as “waiter” or “bartender.” Having a resume that sells translates into getting more money, attaining a great job, and rising up the corporate ladder.
If you’re a first timer, don’t worry about your work experience. Instead, focus on your certifications, which will play a big role in getting you the job that you want. Recommendations, especially from schools you attended, will be of equal importance in your resume. You can also apply professional jargon to demonstrate your proficiency in the field, but note that too much of it will make you sound too artificial for the job.
It gets a bit boring to stay in one level for a long time. You need to have a catchy resume to convince a prospective employer of your abilities to do much better than you currently are. This is where skill headings come into play. You need to categorize and re-label your skills. For example, let’s say you have been a bartender for a long time, along with other managerial skills like managing the staff at the bar, overseeing the satisfaction of the customers, ordering inventories and scheduling the staffs. In other words you have been doing what is not in your job description. When a job opportunity arises that requires a supervisory experience with all the specific work that you have been doing as the Bartender, this is when you doctor your resume to read something from a Bartender or a Head Waiter to a Departmental Manager or Staff Supervisor. Note that you should omit job titles that do not equal the position you want or the position that is vacant. Inclusion of such titles creates an image lower than your desired salary level. Most employers lack the time and the ability to look at unrelated job titles and try to figure out if you possess the skills they are looking for, so play your part and furnish them with all the relevant information.
Remember, most workers in the Food Services Industry are given more responsibility than their job description and so tailoring your resume to fit the required position will give you a greater chance of rising up. When you are leaving the Food Service Industry to explore other fields, eliminate words like restaurant, hospitality, hostess, waiter, or bartender from your resume. This is where you are supposed to focus on the skills that you have gained that are transferable to the other positions you want.
A good resume will help you in adding to your tips a handsome pay check. Resumes that don’t portray the real you will have no way of portraying what the real you wants from the Food Services Industry. Similarly, such resumes result in prolonged job searches that will lead to a lot of wasted time. Self-confidence is also paramount in presenting a workable resume. Knowing what you want will reward you with the salary you are looking for, or better still, the much awaited and wanted change from monotony.