Administrative Assistant
Resume Example

Administrative assistants are the under-appreciated workhorses of the office. You’re often overworked, and definitely underpaid. Without you, the gears that keep the office running smoothly would grind, stutter, and come to a halt.

Skilled administrative assistants are masters of multitasking, discretion, and time management. To the greatest extent possible, you need to come up with examples of these traits to show in your resume. Here’s where to start:

1. Common Skills for an administrative assistant

The more skills that a candidate has, the less they will need to be trained and the faster they will be able to contribute to the company. That’s why employers are always on the lookout for applicants with the right amount of quality skills. Below you will find the top skills required to fulfill an administrative position.

When it comes to including these skills on your resume, they can either be added to your additional skills section or proven as a bullet point in your professional experience section. If you are looking for some pre-formatted skills, then stop by our additional skills writing guide.

2. Make the Career Objective your Opening Pitch

The Career Objective is designed to give the hiring manager a reason to continue reading your resume. The candidate in the sample above has succeeded with her Career Objective, for these reasons:

• She describes how long she’s been an administrative assistant, and the main duties she performed
• She lists her degree, and her expertise in relevant software (Microsoft Excel)
• She tells the hiring manager which role she wants to fill, and why she’s a good choice

Essentially, she’s made a very compact argument for why she’d be a good candidate for the job in a very short amount of space. Now, the hiring manager will be intrigued, and look for evidence of her claims further in the resume.

This should help her earn on average around $35,330 USD annually. In the next section, we explain how to make your resume’s bullet points strong and impactful.

3. Target your Professional Experience

Back up the claims you made in your Career Objective with examples from your professional experience, listing them in a bullet format. Below, we’ve chosen the three strongest bullet points from the above sample resume for you to consider. We’ve also bolded the strongest parts of each bullet point:

• Developed new filing and organizational practices, saving the company $3,000 per year in contracted labor expenses

The above bullet point proves that the candidate is a skilled, competent, and motivated worker. She took the initiative to create a new organizational policy, and saved the company money. This makes her strong interview material.

• Trained 2 administrative assistants during a period of company expansion to ensure attention to detail and adherence to company policy

As shown above, the ability to train new employees also demonstrates competence and confidence, and also proves that she is trusted by management to handle sensitive tasks.

• Typed documents such as correspondence, drafts, memos, and emails, and prepared 3 reports weekly for management

Here, the candidate quantified the amount of reports she made weekly, giving the hiring manager a strong mental picture of the scope of her responsibility, and how much work she had to do. Preparing 3 reports weekly shows that she is an efficient worker who can process data quickly and manage time expertly.

4. Action Verbs for an Administrative Assistant Resume

Arrange	Distribute	Generate	Oversee	Record
Assist	Draft	Greet	Purchase	Schedule
Coordinate	File	Organize	Raise	Train

Like the above list of action verbs? There’s more where that came from! Visit the longest action verb list in the universe.

What parts of your professional experience make the strongest case to interview you? Be sure to think on it, and do research before writing your resume. Resume Genius’ software provides built-in professional resume templates and phrases to assist you in any needs.