TOPCHEFS

Chef Recruitment Agency

Chef CV-Resume Templates – Anatomy

Chef CV-Resume Template Downloads

We’re happy to provide Chefs’ with Resume-CV resources for download. Rather than assume these CV templates make perfect sense to all chefs we’d prefer you to have a brief explanation of the components of a Chef’s CV and why we’ve arranged these documents in the way you see them.

Anatomy of a Chef's CV
Chef CV-Resume Anatomy

Chef’s CV-Resume Component By Component

  1. Chef’s Identity and contact details
    Always strive for accuracy here. This is effectively your business card and if you were getting business cards printed you’d take a lot of care to proof read them before going to press. Exercise the same attention to detail here. Adjust the home address field according to the norm which applies to the country you live in, i.e. for Ireland, Zip is equivalent to “Post Code” and comes after “City.” Likewise where in other jurisdictions State/Province might apply, in Ireland it’s the norm to use “Country.” So adjust these CV-Resumes to what applies in the country in which your address is situated. Here’s another, often overlooked point, make sure the email on your CV matches the email you use when distributing your CV.
  2. Chef Profile
    CV cover letters are often ignored and very often dumped. The profile section of your Chef CV should take its place. This shouldn’t be greater than a paragraph, should be an accurate description of what type of chef you are and highlight your short to medium term ambitions. If you wish to increase the possibility your CV will stand out this is the place to optimize your narrative to fit better with the chef job for which you’re applying
  3. Chef’s Work Experience
    Nowadays this should run as a reverse narrative, i.e. start with your most recent experience and work backwards towards your first job, whether or not that first job was as a Chef. The job title can be relatively generic i.e. Chef De Partie. However if you opt for brevity in the job title expand on it in the paragraph below. So expand on Chef De Partie to explain what sections your worked on, i.e. Sauces, Larder etc. The CV templates we’ve provided run year to year, this assumes the applicant stays reasonably long in each chef job. If that’s not the case, and especially in the case of seasonal work it often isn’t, then add the months you started and finished to the heading i.e. March 1994 – September 1994. However, for the sake of Resume consistency, make sure you apply that convention to all the dates in your CV.
  4. Chef’s Education
    In most cases catering & hospitality employers are interested in your work experience first and education second. An occasional exception to this rule is if you’re only recently graduated from catering college. In this event you might wish to cut and paste this section and move it to above “Work Experience.”
  5. Chef’s Skills
    While Catering Recruiters and Potential Employers can often infer a chef’s skills based on where he’s worked it is still good practice to make this easy for them by using this section to highlight particular skills. If you’ve a particular flair for Asian Fusion, Molecular Gastronomy, Butchery etc then this is where you should showcase these culinary talents. Warning: These talents should have a “reference experience” elsewhere on your CV. What’s meant by this is that if you’re claiming a degree of competence in Molecular Gastronomy then either your work experience or Education details should make it apparent how this competency was acquired. Incongruous and/or unsupportable claims will damage your CV rather than enhance it.
  6. Chef’s References
    If you’re in a position to supply relevant referees then this is the place to put them. It should be apparent from their job title the extent to which their opinion of you can help. So aim for former employers or supervisors and aim for ones who have a favourable opinion of your work. We recommend you clear this in advance.
  7. Page Footer
    In the event that your CV-Resume runs to longer than one page then it’s a very good idea to insert your ID and contact details in the CV-Resume footer. You’ll want to allow for the possibility of Human Resource or Recruitment Agent office foul-ups and a frequent one is CV’s becoming mixed up. You can increase the chances of yours remaining intact if you use the CV-Resume footer as we recommend.

Chefs CV-Resume Layout

Whether you know it, or not, your Chef CV-Resume is unlikely to escape the attention of a Catering Recruitment Agency’s “Applicant Tracking System.” In short, this is a database driven repository which recruitment agents use to store candidate details, sometimes this is referred to as a “Talent Bank.”

Recruitment Agencies go to a lot of trouble building up such talent banks and the process is very time consuming. One utility which many recruitment agencies use to make this job easier is called “CV Parsing Software.” This is software which scans an electronic copy of a CV, i.e. documents with the file extensions .doc .docx (Microsoft Word Documents) .rtf .txt .text (Universally accepted text document standards) or .pdf (Adobe Acrobat files).

We’ve chosen a layout and used semantic conventions which are known to play well with such software. You may wonder why as an applicant you should care whether or not your Chef CV-Resume plays well with CV Parsing Software? Here’s why: Recruitment agents are very busy, they have to get through a lot of CV’s every day. They rely on CV Parsing Software to make their workflows easier. A typical workflow is to check their emails, preview a CV, download CV and move to next email and CV till they’ve reached a state often referred to as “in-box zero.” Next they batch upload the Chef’s CV’s to their “Applicant Tracking System,” review each one in turn, make some manual edits (this software isn’t perfect), add some notes and save. Once they’re past this stage they then move on to assign each new record to the vacancies they have on their books. Only when all these conditions have been met will they begin contacting candidates.

So knowing this, do you want to be the Chef whose CV-Resume didn’t parse? Sure, many agents will pick up on this in time and manually add your record, but do you want to take that chance? I recommend you don’t. It’s a very competitive jobs market and chef’s who pay a bit of attention to detail, in composing their CV-Resume, give themselves an advantage in the catering and hospitality jobs market, both in Ireland and Internationally.

Please remember, once you’ve finished designing your CV Resume be sure to call back and upload a copy, we’d love to register you with us. It’s as simple as visiting our Chef CV Uploads Form and filling out a couple of details and sending them to us. Remember to attach your CV.

To learn more about TOPCHEFS and to obtain full and up-todate information on the wide choice of jobs we have on offer call us on (01) 633 4053. In the business of managing your career, it’s the only number you’ll ever need.
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