A great dining experience is your top priority. Kitchen staff members are directed, food quality is ensured, and customer service is provided effectively with you in charge.
Now, it’s time to ensure you dish up the right set of skills as you look to grow your career, so you’ll need an appropriate resume template.
Food quality and health scores are a top priority, making it essential for dining establishments to choose the right managers for the job. We’re here to help with our quick cover letter generator plus food service manager resume examples that have helped many culinary pros land their ideal jobs.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Food Service Manager Skills & Work Experience
From customer service to ensuring efficient kitchen preparations, you oversee it all. You’re probably wondering, how do you condense all those responsibilities into 6 to 10 top skills on a resume?
The food service’s job description will be your friend here. Think of it like a customer ordering exactly what they want so you can expertly prepare it for their needs, just applied to listing out your skills in this case.
That way, if a restaurant specializes in presentation and garnishings, you can emphasize your culinary arts skills to show how you fit those needs.
Here are some popular food service management skills to get you started.
9 popular food service manager skills
- Customer Service
- Inventory Control
- Staff Development
- Scheduling
- POS Systems
- Vendor Management
- Culinary Arts
- Sanitization
- Cost Control
Sample food service manager work experience bullet points
The food service business is fast-paced, so hiring managers will want to see real results from how you’ve performed in the past.
The best way to optimize is using the numbers you know restaurants care about the most.
For instance, you could list customer satisfaction, health code scores, or preparation efficiency metrics. Then, detail in short one-sentence examples how you helped improve each category while running the kitchen.
Here are a few samples:
- Oversaw and inspected all vendor deliveries as they came in to boost quality control standards by 53%.
- Implemented a new customer waitlist system using WaitWhile that improved seating efficiency by 42%.
- Performed competitive analysis on menu prices using Fishbowl to help boost average sales per table by 67%.
- Reworked weekly schedules based on employee needs to ensure a proper staff-to-customer ratio was achieved 97% of the time.
Top 5 Tips for Your Food Service Manager Resume
- Optimize with reverse chronological order
- As you’ve worked up the ranks from a food service associate to management positions, you’ve likely gained many new skills over time. Therefore, listing your most recent experiences first is optimal to show your current quality control and staff development abilities.
- Use action words in examples
- You probably use an active tone to ensure a great dining experience when assisting the restaurant’s customers. You can optimize your resume similarly by using action words like “prepared” or “monitored.”
- Always proofread
- Just like getting a customer’s order wrong can make for a poor dining experience, a resume full of inaccuracies or grammatical errors can lower your chances of getting called for an interview. Always proofread before submitting.
- Keep it on one page
- Most restaurants try to optimize the customer experience by avoiding a menu that’s too long since it can feel overwhelming for customers. The same is true for your resume. Keep it to a concise one-page overview of your top abilities like culinary art and cost control.
- Both leadership and technical ability matter
- As the manager, you’ll be expected to lead the kitchen staff while having high levels of knowledge in aspects like high-volume food prep. Your resume should show how you use both types of abilities.
A resume summary will work well if you have ten or more years of experience in the food service industry. For example, you could explain in a few sentences how you revamped customer service protocols for a local restaurant chain that boosted satisfaction scores by an average of 45% across locations.
If you have relevant education like a business management or culinary degree, you should list it. It’ll provide more relevant information about how you’ve built your skills in aspects like pricing strategies or food quality assurance.
Limiting your resume to three or four jobs will work best for food service managers. Food services are fast-paced, so hiring managers often do quick reviews when initially receiving resumes. Limiting the jobs will help them identify your most relevant abilities in kitchen management.
