When you work in a fast food restaurant, you might handle any task from washing dishes or stocking ingredients, to preparing food orders ASAP as each ticket appears. You may also input orders and manage customer transactions.
But where do you find a resume template that’s as convenient and appealing as a hot meal on the go? What’s most important to emphasize and show off your niche?
Don’t sweat it—you’ll be doing enough of that once you start your next exciting kitchen job! We’ve helped hard workers like you for years, and our three fast food restaurant resume examples will get you on the fast track to success.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Work History
The skills section on your fast food restaurant resume can require some agile thinking. Just as you think on your feet during rush hour, you’ll have to adapt your resume skills list to reflect whichever of your traits best relate to your profession.
Avoid broad skills that could apply to any profession, like “communication” or “customer service”. While these are great abilities to have, they don’t specifically highlight your desirability in a fast food setting.
Be as specific as possible by listing “orders conflict resolution” and “cash & card payment transactions” instead of vaguely mentioning interpersonal skills. And keep other abilities related to kitchen and register duties as technical as you can, too!
9 top fast food restaurant skills
- Active Listening
- Multitasking
- Cash Register
- Order Delivery
- Refunds/Replacements
- Drive Thru Orders
- Adaptability
- De-escalation
- Food Prep
Sample fast food restaurant work experience bullet points
Nice lineup of skills! But what exactly is a recruiter “ordering” once they read your resume? Your skills show what you can do, and your experience section is the place to talk about when you’ve done it.
Immediately demonstrate your value with examples of how you’re a pro at navigating the infamous lunch rush, or by recounting how you saved a previous restaurant from losing profits with your exceptional food safety and handling.
Also: Recruiters want to see quantifiable data that proves you’re not all talk—satisfaction percentages, customer ratings, and dollar amounts. Measure the impact you can make in a fast food restaurant!
Here are some examples:
- Scraped and rinsed dishes before loading, reducing the need for rewashing by 98%
- Exceeded sales targets by 12% by recommending value meals, desserts, drinks, and sides
- Collaborated with cashiers and other service staff to ensure customers received fast, high-quality service, achieving a 5-star restaurant rating
- Adhered meticulously to all store policies and regulations regarding cash handling, reducing errors by 8%
Top 5 Tips for Your Fast Food Restaurant Resume
- Be fast!
- It might be tricky at first to streamline your experience points, but you’ll need to convey your qualifications as quickly as you navigate a drive thru order. Recruiters only spend a few seconds on average on each resume, so deliver your best points fast!
- Demonstrate versatility
- Chances are, you’ll be handling a pretty big variety of tasks in your next fast food role. You might be running register one minute and filling up a promotional dessert cup the next. Include a diverse range of experience examples to show that you can switch gears quickly.
- Maintain an efficient layout
- Our three resume templates are designed to set you up for success alongside being highly customizable: Just make sure you keep pretty close to the clean layouts we’ve already polished up, and put your best food service accomplishments front and center.
- Branching out is fine
- You may not have worked previous jobs in a fast food restaurant, but that doesn’t mean you have to chuck your experiences out into the dumpster! If you’ve worked in any customer service or kitchen-related role, you’re bound to have some usable stuff to work with.
- Avoid free-floating metrics
- Upholding a dozen restaurant policies is cool, but . . . a stronger metric (like an error reduction rate) would be better. If your example point contains a random number of orders or coworkers, make sure that number reinforces an impressive final impact point!
Go a bit above and beyond! Revisit the job description and look for emphasized keywords or phrases (think “serving food and beverages” or “operating deep fryer”) that you can repeat back in your resume. A bit of customization goes a long way.
Again: Refer to the job ad for an idea of the restaurant’s overall tone and work culture to make sure you’re well-aligned, but don’t pass up the opportunity to sprinkle a bit of personality throughout your experience section. The way you share contextual tidbits says a lot about you!
Make your fast food restaurant resume a one-page resume! Remember how little time recruiters have to spend reading, so make it easy for them to get the full picture of your qualifications by keeping your resume short and sweet.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
