You’re there to keep the party going while ensuring safety and compliance with important regulations like food safety and drinking age requirements. You’re familiar with all kinds of novelty recipes, mixing drinks with finesse alongside managing inventory and processing payments.
But how do you use your resume to convey the full scope of your abilities? How should it look when you’re done?
Don’t worry: We’ll smooth this over in no time. Take a look at these three experienced bartender resume templates and time-tested advice for writing cover letters so that you can get closer to your dream job!
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Professional Experience
Skills are super important when you’re looking for that next big bartending job! You’ll need to show recruiters that you know all the basics of bartending already and have advanced past them to a greater level of specialty.
That means that all your skills should relate directly to bartending when possible—or at least carry over and overlap (think of things like time management). And you should be specific!
Use precise terminology to avoid sounding generic. Don’t flatten yourself down to just having “people skills” or “communication” when you could specify that you provide great customer service.
Consider these examples:
9 best Experienced Bartender skills
- Time Management
- Customer Service
- Google Sheets
- Budgeting
- Mixology
- OpenTable
- Leadership
- Food Safety
- Multitasking
Sample Experienced Bartender work experience bullet points
Now that you’ve shown that you have what it takes to shine as an experienced bartender, it’s time to show your skills in action! How did you go above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction and guarantee top-quality drinks during rush hour?
Make sure any accomplishments you include are clearly related to the job you’re applying for. Some stuff may be impressive but not really connected—so stick with the highlights that align with the job description.
And always use metrics to back up your claims and give your impact added weight! Quantifiable data shows that you made noticeable ripples in your workplace.
Here are some good examples:
- Exceeded sales targets by 3% by maintaining a robust knowledge of inventory and quickly assessing customer needs and budget limitations
- Handled customer inquiries and quickly resolve 93% of issues without involving management in a high-traffic setting
- Ensured optimal temperatures for all alcohol storage, helping the company save over $5.1K in losses
- Double-checked any discrepancies between receipts and the POS system, identifying and resolving 98% of issues without management assistance
- Drove sales up by 6% by anticipating guests’ questions, needs, and tastes
Top 5 Tips for Your Experienced Bartender resume
- Mix up those metrics!
- Metrics are just about always awesome if they lend credence to your accomplishments, but they’re even better if they’re super intriguing! Just like you include a variety of flavors in a mixed drink, make sure you bring in several types of metrics like improvement percentages and dollar amounts to spice up your resume.
- Keep your style tasteful
- Make sure you don’t get carried away with unusual fonts or colors on your resume. You want to stand out to recruiters, yes, but readability takes top priority! Stick with minimal color and clean, modern fonts.
- Show your depth of knowledge
- As an experienced bartender, you want to show off the fact that you really know your stuff in-depth! Recruiters want to see that your years of experience have been fruitful, so demonstrate a trend of growth by building up increasingly impressive examples throughout your career.
- Enhance readability with a good template
- You should ultimately pick a resume template that makes your achievements look the most complete and organized. Use the layout to your advantage and make sure your excellent bartending skills and rich experiences have their own places to shine!
- Save some gold for your cover letter!
- Many experienced professionals struggle to keep their resume short and sweet, and parting with some of the greatest accomplishments can be tough! But luckily, you won’t have to say goodbye forever: You can use that story about your incredible rush hour customer service for your bartender cover letter.
One-page resumes only—no matter how experienced you are! Recruiters only have a few seconds per resume, on average, to spend on their initial readthrough.
Honestly, you really don’t if you have enough experience points that speak for themselves. You’re better off leaving the resume summary out instead of wasting page space on something that risks sounding redundant.
Circle back to the job description and look for key skills or signature drinks or themes that set the establishment apart. Once you find where you align most closely with the unique details of the company, reflect those details back in your resume!
