Every business needs a talented leader to oversee daily operations. With you in charge, operational policies are enforced, budgets are managed, and company goals are met.
Is your resume template effectively displaying your managerial skills and helping you create a stellar resume?
When companies hire a GM, they take a detailed approach to ensure an exceptional leader is chosen for the position. To help you optimize for success, we’ve created our cover letter generator and general manager resume examples that are research-driven and proven to be successful in today’s job market.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your General Manager Skills & Work Experience
Every company’s GM needs a broad skill set. That can include stakeholder relations, analyzing financial statements, or deploying the most efficient production processes. So, how do you narrow down the top job skills to put on your resume?
The best way to optimize is to understand each company’s needs and customize your resume accordingly. Reviewing the job description will help you understand specific CRM or analytics software the company uses, along with any core process improvement methodologies like Six Sigma or Lean.
Here are some top general manager skills to get you started.
9 top general manager skills
- Salesforce
- Google Analytics
- Staff Development
- Stakeholder Relations
- Process Improvement
- Financial Analysis
- Market Trends
- Vendor Management
- Oracle HCM
Sample general manager work experience bullet points
You’re skilled in financial analysis and market trends, but you’ll still need more to show you’re the right fit for the job. You can use your work experience bullet points to really make your top job skills shine.
A great way to make these successful is using short descriptions with metrics in each one. For example, you could explain how you implemented Google Data Studio to boost data accessibility by 46%.
It’s also a great idea to use action words like “oversaw” or “reviewed” to make these examples engaging, just like you’d want to do to grab attention when running a company board meeting.
Here are a few samples:
- Led a 120-person production team while implementing Six Sigma processes, resulting in a 35% increase in productive efficiency.
- Analyzed quarterly spending in Xero, identifying 15 cost-saving measures that reduced spending by $330,000.
- Spearheaded a change management initiative that implemented a new employee training system, resulting in a 55% increase in adherence to company policies.
- Introduced a new inventory management system using Fishbowl that boosted accuracy by 39%.
Top 5 Tips for Your General Manager Resume
- Use a mix of technical and leadership skills
- GMs need to have a well-rounded skill set. Your examples should show both how you lead and the technical abilities you possess. For example, leading a 19-person financial team to compile tax-related data, finishing eight days before the target filing date.
- Always measure your impact
- Including numbers in your examples is an excellent way to showcase your impact as a leader. For instance, you could explain how you streamlined customer service systems using Zendesk to boost satisfaction scores by 48%.
- Organize the information
- Format your resume like you would when compiling documentation of key market trends. You should use clear headers, bullet points to break up information, and 12-14 point fonts that are easy to read.
- Keep it on one page
- Every business runs at a fast pace, so you want to avoid your resume being too long. Keep it on a single page while emphasizing the primary skills each company is looking for, like stakeholder relations or Oracle HCM.
- Reverse chronological order is best
- General management applicants should put their most recent experiences first. It’ll help you emphasize the right skills and show how you’ve grown in an ever-changing business environment where software like Salesforce and Xero are continuously being updated.
Even if you haven’t worked as a GM, you still likely have many transferable skills from previous positions as a team leader, assistant manager, or supervisor. If you don’t have much management experience, you could also talk about how you’ve led teams on projects or trained new employees.
You should limit your general management resume to three or four jobs. Ideally, you’ll want to include leadership positions that use skills that fit what the company is seeking. For instance, if you’ll be performing financial analysis, previous roles managing financial statements or budgets would work well.
General managers with ten or more years of experience will benefit from a resume summary. It’ll help you emphasize in a few sentences your top achievements and abilities, like how you used Lean methodologies in manufacturing organizations, boosting the effectiveness of quality control efforts by an average of 47%.
