Retail Manager Resume Example

Retail managers are tasked by their bosses with making their store money and attracting more customers.

To truly win this trust and get offered a management position candidates must prove they have the right levels of competence, diligence, and business savviness. A top-quality resume is essential to showing you have these qualities in spades.

In this guide, we share our three most important tips for putting together a retail manager resume, so that hiring managers will be sure to pick up your application.

1. Include Quantifiable Examples of Your Achievements

The main concern of employers when they’re looking for new retail management hires is whether their candidates have the right experience to look after a potentially multimillion—or even multibillion—dollar business.

Our No. 1 piece of advice then, is to provide concrete examples of your achievements in your previous roles. We call this quantifying your experience, and it involves using numbers to back up your claims.

Let’s take a look at this in our example resume:

Our candidate backs up her claim of being a fantastic retail manager by providing figures showing her past achievements, which includes maximizing company profits.

You should definitely do this too. Doing so reassures your new company that you can deliver, and they can even factor your past performance into their company planning.

Adding quantifiable information is essential for everyone – especially if you’re ambitious.

Let’s take another look at how our candidate uses concrete, numerical data from her resume to great effect:

Here, our candidate reveals how she successfully cut costs at her current company – backing this up by giving the exact figures.

Even if you’re seeking your first retail management position, you can still add some figures that show how you’ve saved your employer money, or drove them extra sales working in a non-managerial role.

2. Craft a Compelling Professional Profile

Your professional profile is the first thing that a hiring manager notices because it’s right at the top of your resume and acts as its introduction.

Unlike a data-packed resume summary, a well-crafted resume objective, an informative summary of qualifications, a resume profile is perfect for retail management resumes because it’s both personalized and general—so easily adapted to new job applications.

Thus, you should make sure that it is short but packed with information and provides specific achievements and a great overall impression of you.

The first thing you see in our example resume is that the candidate immediately specifies how much experience she has:

“Retail manager with 6 years of experience in the clothing and accessories industry.”

Because this information is is of primary importance to a hiring manager, it understandably comes first. You too should make sure the hiring manager sees straight away how much experience you have.

Next, our candidate shows off her leadership experience:

“Led a team of 15 sales associates to drive sales and strengthen brand loyalty.”

The candidate astutely recognizes that for a management role, strong leadership is vital. So, in her second point, she provides information on her prior leadership experience.

In her final two points, our candidate emphasizes her accomplishments in increasing annual sales, and also notes that as a result of her great management, her store clinched a coveted award: “#1 Store in the District,” which tells hiring managers that she can work her magic in their store too.

3. Use Your Key Skills Section to Highlight Your Strengths

Your key skills section is the place to list your hard skills and soft skills.

Included among the candidate’s soft skills are problem solving and leadership, two crucial qualities for retail management. You should definitely list them among your own skills if you have them.

Furthermore, our candidate has English- and Spanish-language skills. Speaking both languages is of course a great asset in states such as Texas or California, which have large Spanish-speaking communities.

This is a brilliant example of tailoring your resume for the job you’re seeking.

As a candidate, you should know a bit about the place you’re hoping to work and should list any skills that will give you an advantage there. For example, maybe you speak French near the Quebec border, or maybe you speak Chinese and work in a retail location popular with tourists in New York City.

Our candidate also lists in-store logistics among her hard skills. She has not really had a chance to mention this ability in other sections of her resume, so feel free to do what she has done here — use the Skills section to include other relevant competencies.

We hope that this has given you some great ideas for crafting your own job-landing retail manager resume!