Chef Resume Sample

1. Display Your Certifications and Skills

The fastest way to boost your resume is to display your certifications, and consider what key skills you should emphasize on your resume. You should consider earning certifications if you don’t have any.

Learn.org has an excellent page that can help you decide which certifications you can earn, why, and how.

Certifications are only one piece of the resume puzzle — you also need to understand which key skills you should include, and how. We’ve created a helpful infographic for you to review, explaining important chef skills to include on your resume:

Chefs may seem to lead glamorous lives with the numerous cooking shows we find on TV. However to be a good chef, it not only requires a talented palate, but also leadership, organization, and hard work. Productive Chefs are able to find quality ingredients while managing their budget.

They can create new menus that will keep diners coming, as well as lead team members so that the kitchen can be a well-oiled machine.

They are reliable, flawlessly serving hungry customers on a daily basis, while ensuring that everyone in the kitchen is working in sync while following proper sanitary and food safety guidelines.

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:

2. Make the Career Objective your Opening

The career objective, also known as a resume objective, is designed to give the potential 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 her years of experience as well as the kind of food that she specializes in
• She shows the scope of what she can handle by including how many tables she can serve
• She mentions her innovation and creativity in utilizing ingredients to create new menus

As you can see, she’s made a concise and persuasive argument for why she’d be a good candidate for the job. Now, the hiring manager seeing her resume will be intrigued, and look for evidence of her claims further in the resume.

3. Target your Professional Experience

Back up the claims you made in your Professional Profile 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:

• Re-developed entire menu in 2012, increasing sales revenue by 150%

The above bullet point proves that the candidate is able to create new dishes rather than just follow instructions by cooking the same thing over and over again. Not only that, the candidate is able to create new products that can attract more customers, and ultimately increase profits.

Notice how the sales increase is quantified — you should aim to pepper your resume with accomplishments in the same way by providing numerical values describing your work experience.

• Developed process that reduced waste by 40% and improved supply turnover by 70%

As shown above, the chef’s ability to decrease waste, not only helps with the restaurant’s profits, but supports the environment.

• Managed relationships with vendors, negotiating prices of ingredients and equipment that resulted in 10% savings on budget

Here, the candidate showed that she has a mindset on ensuring that the restaurant can make money by not only providing great food, but also cutting costs whenever possible.

4. Use Action Verbs for a Punchy Resume

Each bullet point should start with an action verb — but which should you choose? We’ve created a list of common action verbs chef resumes tend to have — but you’re also welcome to peruse the longest list of action verbs in the universe.

Accomplish Allocate Anticipate Assist Clean Cook Create Delegate Deliver Designate Design

Determine Develop Devise Ensure Entertain Fine-tune Handle Improve Interact Inventory Perform

Provide Prepare Organize Manage Meet Monitor Record Save Supervise Train Verify

The key to writing a good resume is emphasizing your key strengths in a quantified manner. Be sure to give due diligence to researching your successes. As always, we recommend our resume builder, which provides automatic bullet points and beautiful templates.