5 Best Practices to write a Chef Resume ~

An ill-composed chef resume is like a bland meal with no taste. You don’t want to serve it.

Making inspiring meals is an art, and so is resume writing. Being the best gourmet chef in town is not enough to help you land the chef job. You need to level up and make an impeccable chef resume too.

Since recruiters spend 6 seconds on a resume, your job here is to make it count to speed your job search.

The 5 best practices we have listed below can help:

Highlight your achievements

Your resume should not be a bland statement of the roles and duties you have performed.

Potential employers are not concerned with your day-to-day functions. What they want to know is the quantifiable aspects of your contributions.

So what if you can cook gourmet meals? any other chef can do that!

But stating that your meals have consistently received great customer feedback and is the main USP of your restaurant can be a defining aspect of your career.

It shows that you aren’t just skilled but that your skills are perhaps the reason why the restaurant you work at is succeeding in the first place.

In other words, you need to think along these lines while you compose the details of your work experience.

The STAR Format is a great way to do this. It helps you show the relation between your responsibilities and achievements. It stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.

Using this format, you can effectively showcase the visible results of your contribution.

Eg: “Updated the menu and reinvented ~10 dishes to cater to the changing food preference of customers leading to a 10% increase in food orders”

In the above example, the situation, task, action, and the result of the chef’s roles were:

*Situation: The changing food preference of people

*Task: To cater to this changing food preference and increase sales

*Action: Reinventing dishes

*Result: 10% increase in food order

Moreover, as you can see from the above example, we have marked the important achievements and figures using bold.

Marking important information & achievements in bold helps you to better showcase your talent and abilities. This also increases your chances of getting shortlisted since the recruiter does not have to evaluate your resume with the attention of a hawk to identify the essential highlights of your work.

Use power verbs

A powerful hack to write impeccable resumes is using power verbs.

Most professionals don’t know this, but the use of power verbs can revolutionize the impact your resume has on people.So as a general practice, use power/action verbs to begin the points of your work experience.

Eg: Liaising with the busboy to prepare & serve food to 50+ customers every day

Using power verbs like liaising instead of using a monotonous word like working helps the professional improve the impact it has on the person going through their resume.

Moreover, it gives a punch of assertiveness and demonstrates professionalism in a way that using words like working fails to do.

Write a powerful Objective/Professional Summary

If you are planning to build your career as a chef from the bottom, then you should write an Objective. However, if you carry more than 3 years of experience, then write a professional summary.

An objective section helps you communicate your passion and what you can offer to the organization. However, a professional summary is a brief statement of your professional journey and expertise.

A resume summary and an objective should be written in a paragraph spanning 3-5 lines.

The examples below showcases an ideal objective and summary for your chef resume:

Objective:

“Enterprising Professional looking to develop a career as a Chef. Proficient in preparing continental, Italian, and European dishes. Gained expertise in vegan dishes and continually experimenting with food to come up with new recipes”.

Summary:

“4+ years experienced Head Chef with extensive experience in working at michelin star restaurants and top-rated Hotels. Exceptionally skilled in preparing continental,asian, european, and american cuisines. Proficient in training and managing junior chefs and reinventing dishes to cater to the changing food preferences of people”.

List your Certifications

Recruiters are constantly looking for professionals who aspire to consistently broaden their horizons with newly gained expertise – a certification helps you prove that you have this trait.

You should have something concrete to showcase what you learned, and that can be done by listing the certifications you have done.

Check out the example below on how you can write your certification in the resume:

Optimize your LinkedIn profile

In this day and age it’s extremely important to be present on different social media platforms. One of which can help you land a job is LinkedIn, it’s the social network for professionals. On top of that, many hiring managers use LinkedIn to find new employees and if you are looking for a new job, that’s a place where to be.

You can start by checking other LinkedIn profiles to see how others stand out, add stunning profile image and background photo, and try to add content that can tell a story. It’s also possible to get a consultant that would help you optimize your LinkedIn profile. Going the extra mile is something that adds to your digital appearance and more often than not, would help you find the job in a heart beat.

Make a seperate section to showcase your skills

Illustrate your skills in such a manner that it best represents your professional abilities. A recruiter needs to know at the first glance that you are the one. Knowing thousands of recipes and being able to reflect that in your chef resume will help you get shortlisted. Not being able to showcase your skills will push you further away from it.

Point is, a recruiter should be able to identify your key skills and functional areas in one go. They can’t do this if they have to explicitly scan through your work experience details to identify your skill-sets.

Your job here is to make your skills extremely visible to any recruiter evaluating your resume.

So as a general practice, make a seperate section to illustrate the key culinary skills and other skills that you have cultivated as a professional in the culinary arts.

Here’s an example of what this section should look like once replicated in your chef resume:

Key Takeaways

To sum up:

*Use power verbs to power up the impact you make with your resume.

*Talk about your achievements and mark them in bold.

*Write a powerful objective or summary depending on your work experience.

*Make a list of your certifications in your resume.

*Illustrate your skills under a separate section titled “Key Skills” section.

Author’s Bio:

Aditya Sharma

On a quest to help professionals across the world land their dream jobs, Aditya lives and breathesHiration — an AI-powered online resume builder and platform to help job-seekers find their way in the treacherous job market — where he’s a Co-Founder and the unofficial CPO (Chief Problem-solving Officer). He likes to code away his days and nights when he’s not busy disrupting the career space.