Free Online Resume Builder

Good Resume Karma for Hospitality Workers

So, you've done your turn in the trenches. You've been a busperson, head waiter, bartender, host, and what-not. After ten to twenty years, many hospitality workers, feeling burned-out at the late shifts and long hours, yearn to break into the ranks of higher management. Yet they find themselves in a kind of 'glass ceiling' situation. They can't get a recruiter to look twice at their resume, even when the qualifications are more than a match for the job.

The place where hospitality is at a disadvantage is the job titles. The hospitality industry being as pinched for profits as it is, someone hired as a waiter or bartender will find themselves performing management functions: balancing books, being in charge of the staff, purchasing, ordering, overseeing the operation of the establishment, and on and on. All of these skills are transferable to higher-salary jobs, but because they were done under the job title of "hostess" or some such, they mean zip as far as an interviewer is concerned.

This is a shame, as the person who knows the business the best is the one who worked their way up through the ranks. The computer age has also sealed the fate of many poorly-considered resumes, as human resource departments search resumes in electronic form, including and excluding keywords and only pulling up those resumes that meet the search criteria.

The recruiter's ultimate responsibility is to the restaurants, hotels, casinos, and clubs which they are hired to represent. This is not to say that they don't also have your best interests at heart; it just means that recruiters have to comply with the job description and qualifications set forth by their clients. So they are unable to present candidates that do not match those requirements - no matter how much a candidate calls back.

So this should tell you something: there are good and bad keywords and phrases. Words like "restaurant, hotel, hostess, waitress, bartender, cook, chef" tend to get you stuck in a rotating cycle of those positions forever. What they fail to address is that you have done work far outside the scope of your job title, and are ready for a meatier career. A broad majority of hospitality job seekers have job titles unrelated to their current career goals.

You are much better off using skill headings rather than job titles, if your goal is to land higher salaries and increase your interview rates. For example, if you were quite practiced in enhanced selling at your business, a handy leading line might be: "A versatile and skilled sales and marketing professional with excellent hands-on experience in developing and improving sales for wholesale and retail operations in the hospitality industry." You did it, why not flaunt it?

Or if you were eventually saddled with overseeing the restaurant staff when all you started out as is a line cook, it's high time you boasted: "An assertive manager with outstanding interpersonal people management skills, experienced in communications, negotiations, operations, and scheduling." Again, your title may not have been manager, but that's still the job you did, and the one you're seeking now!

Bartenders are another catch-all position. The head office sees a bartender as somebody who washes glasses and pours. But the best of all outcomes is when your bar business expands so that now you're booking entertainers, arranging bachelor parties, expanding to include a kitchen, purchasing and warehousing the stock, hiring and firing help, placing advertisements, and generally overseeing the day-to-day operations. You've been promoted in everything but title!

How better to highlight some bullet points:

- Recruited and trained X-number servers and kitchen employees in full service dining. - Assisted in the X-number% reduction of labor costs through better selection of staff. - Reduced labor and cost of goods sold by X-number%. - Carried out a demographic study that pin-pointed the establishment's market. - Developed and oversaw the new catering program. - Analyzed and upgraded kitchen equipment to achieve greater efficiency. - Improved cost control by eliminating waste. - Consistently ran low-overhead costs throughout seasonal highs and lows. - Prepared the annual budget for the branch location. - Directed the development of a new line of appetizers.

To your ears, this may sound like "laying it on thick", and you may be right, but you have to understand that head-hunters think this way. To them, there is no "we switched to a cheaper brand of vodka in our martinis". There is only "efficiently oversaw a new product strategy that reduced price of goods sold".

Chefs are another career category with a few roadblocks in advancement. The publicity of the Celebrity Chefs of the Food Network has helped the chef career gain new stamina in recent years, but maybe that casino manager with the hospitality manager position doesn't watch the Food Network. Many people think 'chef' and are unable to picture anything but a line cook in front of a grill, flipping steaks.

If you engaged in anything involving creativity, such as pastry, planning a menu, designing a new side dish, experimenting with a new recipe, or coming up with a new line of beverages, there's room in marketing and design arts for you. After all, if your endeavors were successful, then that shows that you know your target market and what they like. If your restaurant started hosting banquets and providing catering services, then your responsibilities grew with the business.

Whatever the situation, it's hard not to find examples where you expanded your job experience to fulfill higher duties. The trick, then, is to focus on your newly gained skills, which, after all, you undertook in the first place hoping for advancement, did you not? By phrasing things in a more general way, it makes it evident that your skills are easy to transfer to a new job category.

Freelance writer for over eleven years. Chef Pants Aprons Dickies Uniform Scrubs

MORE ARTICLES:

Increase Freelance Sales With an Online Resume!
Freelancing is a competitive business, especially in today's fast-paced, e-focused world.Often there are hundreds of writers competing for the same, limited number of assignments, and the writer who can best showcase his or her abilities is the one who lands the job.

How to Choose an Online Resume Writing Service
Believe it or not, you may not be the best person to write your resume Sure, you know your background and experience better than anyone, but translating that information into a successful resume that nets you an interview isn?t an easy task

TalentDrive's TalentMatch Resume Sourcing Service Now Fully Automated for Small Businesses
With the Click of a Mouse, Small Businesses Can Now Build a Customized Job Description and Search Over 40,000 Online Locations for Quality Resumes.

Building a Strong Resume with the Right Accountancy Jobs
A professional who wants to build a career as a successful accountant needs to know where to find good accountancy jobs. The growing number of accountancy graduates hitting the job market each year makes it difficult for qualified accountants to find well-paid positions. Your ability to hunt down accountancy jobs in the right industries at the right time will help you find work that is fulfilling over the long term.

The Interviewable Resume
It is rumored that the only word William Shakespeare wrote on his resume was "Available." We'll probably never know if that is true.

The Executive Resume - Moving Beyond Accomplishments
There is a major difference between conventional resumes and executive resumes. Accomplishments are usually the center point of a conventional resume (i.

Professional Resume Writer Organization Provides "Kevlar Shield" and "First Response Backpacks" for U.S. Troops Stationed Abroad
National Resume Writers' Association donates Kevlar Shield and First Response Backpacks to help protect and provide aid to military service members. Organization's members also adopt soldiers and decorate "Blankets of Hope" through Soldiers' Angels program.

Writing An Engineering Resume That Gets Attention
You?re talented and experienced, so any old resume should be able to secure that dream job you?re after, right Wrong

Talent Technology Releases New Version of its Market Leading Resume Extraction Technology
Updated version of resume extraction engine delivered with new customer-driven features, enhancements and improved internationalization capabilities. Product continues to set industry benchmark for features, extraction accuracy and robustness.

"Have Guitar, Will Travel" Staind Frontman Aaron Lewis Hits The Road To Resume His First Ever National Solo Acoustic Tour - "Have Guit
Grammy nominated Staind frontman Aaron Lewis hits the road for his first, ever national solo acoustic tour "Have Guitar, Will Travel."

Use Your Resume to Help You Move up the Corporate Ladder
So, you?ve been working in the same position for several years and now feel the time is right to elevate your level of responsibility along with your title and salary However, with this being your first time attempting to move into a more prominent role, you have no idea where to start

10 Tips On Writing An It Resume
The IT job market is still one of the hottest markets and commands the highest resume response from job seekers. Given the sheer volume of resumes that a hiring manager has to sift through for each position, only the strongest resumes actually get past the initial 30 second screening. The national average for resumes received for each IT position advertised is 300 and increasing.

Your Resume Education Section: Top or Bottom?
If you are in school, just graduated, or have been out of school for less than three years, your education information should be at the top. After three years, it needs to go on the bottom. And the longer you are out of school, the shorter your education section should become. If for some reason in the three plus years you have been out of school, you have not accumulated a lot of impressive work experience to outshine your educational background, you may consider keeping your education section at the top for a couple more years; but it would be more prudent, of course, to consider garnering more work experience to strengthen the overall effect of your resume. After you've been out of school for ten years, no one is going to care about what...

What You Should Never Put on Your Resume
Liars Get Caught! What NOT to Put on Your Resume"Everybody does it" as they say. Face it, the job market can be a very tough place to compete.