Front Desk Resume Sample

Creating a front desk receptionist resume doesn’t need to be difficult. Bear these tips in mind as you write yours to impress hiring managers and get more interviews.

Showcase Your Front Desk Resume Skills

Hiring managers have little time, and (sometimes) even less patience. Make it immediately clear that you have the skills needed to succeed in a front desk role so they take your application seriously.

One way to do this is by writing a strong resume skills section to strategically highlight your most valuable abilities related to front desk work.

A winning receptionist needs both soft skills and hard skills.

Soft Skills

Resume soft skills are abilities you naturally learn and improve as you become an adult. For example, your people skills develop as you interact with classmates at school, relatives at family gatherings, and friends at social events.

They’re important for front desk roles, because you’ll be interacting with people on a daily basis — from within your company as well as visitors.

Hard Skills

You’ll also need to include hard skills on your resume as part of a winning application. Hard skills are those you’ve learned formally — for example, at school or through an online class.

The main hard skills you need as a receptionist or secretary are computer skills — ones that allow you to complete your work. For example, you might have to organize invoices using Google Sheets, or make company-wide announcements with Slack.

List only key, relevant skills that you’re confident talking about in an interview on your resume, like this front desk agent does in their skills section:

• Transcription
• Time Management
• Written Communication
• Microsoft Outlook
• Interpersonal Skills
• Apache Solr

Write a Compelling Front Desk Resume Objective

You need to start your resume with an effective resume objective, because it’s the first thing a hiring manager will read when they open your application.

An important thing to remember when writing a resume objective is it should reflect the company’s needs, not your personal goals. With that in mind, target your career objective to each organization by writing a new one every time you apply somewhere. Look at the following example to get an idea of how this might look:

Front Desk specialist with two years of experience in secretarial work. Graduated from the University of San Francisco with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, and hold a CAP qualification. Looking to apply my communication, time management, and people skills at Mallard’s Technology Inc.

In three short sentences, the applicant states their experience, lists two key qualifications, and highlights several job-specific abilities that will help them thrive at that particular company.

When writing your resume objective, you should do the same. Include:

1. relevant skills,
2. notable qualifications, and
3. work experience.

Include Quantifiable Data to Demonstrate Your Abilities

Although your resume may already detail your skills, experience, and educational background, the hiring manager needs to know what such information means in context. So it’s vital you include numbers on your resume where you can.

Quantifiable data includes numbers or percentages —  statistics that make it easier for the hiring manager to understand your contributions to a previous employer.

Let’s look at one example:

• Transcribe audio of C-suite officer meetings at a rate of 70 words per minute

This candidate shows the hiring manager exactly what they can do if hired. If you leave this kind of information off your resume, the hiring manager won’t have any idea of how skilled you are, only that you supposedly “have” those skills.

If you’re struggling to come up with exact numbers, you can estimate by using the words “approximately” or “roughly” or the “+” symbol:

• Received 20+ phone calls per day and transferred them to the applicable member of staff

Takeaways

Now you know how to write a front desk receptionist resume, it’s time to get started on yours. You can download the sample on this page, or if you’d prefer a different style, check out our collection of resume templates.

Picked a different resume template? You can find the matching cover letter template on our website too.

And if you’re in a hurry, build your resume in under 5 minutes with our free-to-use resume builder.

Good luck on your job search!