Serious companies need someone to ensure that operational practices are aligned to help achieve their goals. That’s where you come in, using your top-notch skill set to develop operational strategies, oversee employee onboarding, and monitor productivity statistics.
But are you using a professional resume template that will help show you’re the operations specialist companies need?
We can help with our chief operating officer (COO) resume examples plus cover letter writing tips that consistently land key leadership roles in today’s job market. They’ll give busy pros like yourself an easy template to optimize the application process as you take the next steps in your career.
Why this resume works
- To set yourself up for success, break the mold and craft a stellar chief operating officer resume that’s anything but cookie-cutter. It should showcase your charisma, laser-sharp vision, and genuine interest in the role. And the best place to start? A compelling career objective right below the header or even in the side column.
- In just a couple of sentences, your career objective needs to capture the essence of your professional skills that make you the ideal candidate for the COO role. Plus, make sure it mirrors the hiring company’s goals. It’s your chance to lay your cards on the table so the recruiter can see why you’re the one for the job.
Why this resume works
- Giving credit where due, you have to admire how Wyatt tailored this healthcare chief operating officer resume and got the job. Follow this lead and think outside the box.
- For instance, while the operations manager experience is outside the healthcare spectrum, achievements like improving operational efficiency and streamlining workflows made this example stand out.
Why this resume works
- Is it about time you scaled the ladder and became a COO? First of all, you’ll need a “killer” chief operating officer founder resume. How do you make yours as such?
- Showcasing proficiencies in a range of effective software –BambooHR, Tableau, etc., would be a good start. That’s not enough. Throw in impactful achievements (read: optimizing processes and timely project deliveries) to make your piece invincible.
Related resume examples
Tailor Your Chief Operating Officer (COO) Resume to the Job Description
Companies’ specific qualifications for COOs will vary quite a bit depending on their industry and specific operational procedures. For example, one company may use the Six Sigma methodology, whereas another uses total quality management.
The job description will help you pick the right job skills and work experiences for your resume. So, whether a company seeks help with crisis management or employee onboarding, you’ll know what to emphasize to stand out.
Need some ideas?
15 top chief operating officer (COO) skills
- Growth Strategies
- Supply Chain
- Process Improvement
- Lean Six Sigma
- Agile Methodology
- Negotiation
- Cost Control
- Employee Onboarding
- Salesforce
- Power BI
- Crisis Management
- Customer Service
- Tableau
- NetSuite
- Asana
Your chief operating officer (COO) work experience bullet points
When you’re the head of operations, the results you get will be crucial to the company’s success. So, how do COOs present that on a resume?
A great way to do so is by showcasing achievements from previous jobs, such as how you successfully reduced costs after analyzing financial records.
Here are some great metrics COOs can use to make achievements stand out.
- Operational efficiency: At the heart of operational management is how quickly tasks can be completed, so maximizing efficiency is always a great sign for COOs.
- Cost reductions: Many COOs are tasked with some portion of financial management, so reducing costs while maintaining quality will make you stand out.
- Operational discrepancies: Compliance and communication are also a big concern for companies, so keeping operational discrepancies to a minimum is an excellent way of showing the effects of your efforts.
- Return on investment (ROI): When you make operational investments, it’s always a good idea to showcase the great returns that spending had.
See what we mean?
- Led the integration of Salesforce across the operations team, resulting in a 26% increase in team efficiency.
- Optimized supply chain processes through Oracle, reducing inventory carrying costs by 18%.
- Decreased claims denials by 18% through predictive analytics and streamlined coding practices.
- Conducted end-to-end testing of SAP Ariba implementations for 3 enterprise clients, achieving a 98% success rate in production deployments.
9 active verbs to start your chief operating officer (COO) work experience bullet points
- Led
- Introduced
- Optimized
- Validated
- Coordinated
- Automated
- Guided
- Increased
- Achieved
3 Tips to Improve Your Chief Operating Officer (COO) Resume When You’re Inexperienced
- Emphasize transferable experiences
- Even if you haven’t worked as a COO before, you probably have other leadership experiences at this point in your career, such as being an operations manager or assistant operating officer. Therefore, you should have transferable experiences leading teams and deploying process improvements that you can add.
- Use reverse chronological formatting
- When you have less experience as a COO, it’ll be essential to emphasize your most relevant experiences to hiring managers. So, putting your most recent jobs first will help showcase your current skill set in aspects like growth strategies as you’ve grown in your career.
- List relevant projects
- When you don’t have much relevant career experience to include, adding some projects can help. For example, you could reference a non-profit project where you developed and implemented data management software for a healthcare organization.
3 Tips to Enhance Your Chief Operating Officer (COO) Resume When You’re Experienced
- Keep it to three or four jobs
- Experienced COOs don’t need to list every job they’ve worked at since your resume would get too long. So, keep it to three or four that are most recent and use a relevant skill set in aspects like regulatory and project management.
- Add a summary
- A resume summary can be a great idea for experienced COOs. It could emphasize some key details, such as a couple of sentences describing how you’ve automated back-end Shopify scripts successfully for over 50 clients, reducing costs by an average of $265,000 and processing times by 42%.
- Keep it on a single page
- While you have a lot of experience, it’ll be important to narrow in on what’s most important to each company to ensure an easy reviewing experience for hiring managers. Stick with a one-page resume focused on the most important details, like your negotiation skills if you’ll be managing vendor contracts.
Action verbs like “managed” and “improved” add impact to your examples. For instance, it sounds better to say you “managed 14 production teams while deploying agile methodologies that boosted efficiency by 48%” rather than just saying you were “in charge of production teams and agile systems.”
COOs can do a few simple things to ensure a resume passes ATS checks. The first is to put the exact position title at the top of the resume, such as “healthcare chief operating officer.” Then, include some key job skills like process reengineering or Salesforce exactly as they’re listed in the job description.
You should write a separate resume for each COO job you apply to. It’ll ensure you stand out for unique qualifications companies are seeking, like M&A or performing risk assessments.
