Tips To Tailor Your Resume In The Food And Beverage Industry
By Samantha Strom
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To whom (or what) it may concern: tips to tailor your resume in the food and beverage industry
An extremely common piece of job search advice is to tailor your resume, but it’s hard to know exactly how to do it. The first step: understand who (or what) is reading it. Job searchers often assume that their resume goes into an email inbox or a physical stack at someone’s desk that employers look through. That does happen sometimes- especially at smaller companies, such as mom and pop bakeries or local restaurants.
But what most people don’t know is that larger companies have automated this process. They use software called Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to scan and sort resumes. This software scans for items in your resume that match the job post, such as the position title and hard and soft skills. It then assigns your resume a value, let’s say 3 out of 5 stars. A recruiter then opens their software system and begins clicking on all the 5-star resumes, then the 4-star resumes. If they have enough great candidates before they get to the 3-star group, your resume never gets seen by a real person. So if you’re applying to a large company, such as a major hotel brand or a nationwide restaurant chain, you need to write your resume not just to impress a person, but to impress the robot who reads it first. Side note- recruiters will also always read the category of job searchers who clicked the box “referred by an internal candidate”, which is one of the reasons why networking is so important.
So how do you impress the ATS? Here are a few tricks:
Test your resume out with Jobscan. This is an amazing resource that has a sample ATS. You can put the text of your resume alongside the text from a job post and see what your match rate is.
Include the exact job title that’s on the job post as one of your titles. Example: if the job title says Professional Host and you had Hostess in your past job title- change to Professional Host.
Write all of the dates in your work history as Month/Year-Month/Year- that’s how the ATS adds up your years of experience.
Put your resume in a plain Microsoft Word document without fancy formatting like columns, tables, icons, or images. The ATS can’t scan those and it will either jumble it all together or won’t read the data.
Add keywords from the job post. If the position description says, “looking for a self-starter”, add self-starter somewhere in your resume. It can help to have a section at the bottom of your resume titled “TECHNICAL AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS” where you can interchange the specific keywords used in each job post.
Next, you still have to impress a recruiter. Overall, your goal is to demonstrate that you can do the job you’re applying for extremely well. The keys to this are (1) understanding exactly what tasks you will perform every day (the job post is a great place to start with this) and (2) marketing your experiences and skills that prove you can do those tasks very well.
Because recruiters often skim resumes very quickly, an effective way to show those relevant experiences is to create an executive summary section at the top of the page. Avoid soft skills like “team player” and general comments such as “looking to learn and grow”. Instead, have a summary section with 3-5 bullet points that showcases your most relevant and impressive skills for that particular job. Example:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
10+ years of progressive back of the house experience in fine dining, food trucks, and fast casual establishments
Promoted to shift supervisor within three months at two different restaurants
Created a vegan, gluten free special that became a best-selling menu item
Bilingual: English and Spanish
This is your elevator pitch for why they should give you an interview. You want the recruiter to say, “Wow- this person would crush this job. Let’s give them a call”.
Samantha Strom is the founder of Quarterlife Crisis, which provides career and leadership coaching to young professionals. Previously, Samantha worked at Johnson & Wales University where she helped hundreds of students and alumni in the food and beverage industry write resumes, LinkedIn profiles, cover letters, and prepare for interviews. She currently co-hosts an advice podcast with her identical twin who is a therapist called Closely Related. The podcast has covered topics including supervising Gen Z, speaking up at work, and the value of status in your career.
