You’re a recruiter, and it’s your job to evaluate others and examine their resumes. However, auditing finished resumes and creating a recruiter resume from the ground up are two completely different beasts.
Fear not, because you already have the knowledge. All you need is a nudge in the right direction—a guideline here, an expert tip there.
This article has everything you’ll ever need to craft a captivating recruiter resume that will impress your peers, and we can even help you do that in a matter of minutes. Interested to know how? Let’s get started!
Key Takeaways
Some of the best formats for your recruiter resume are chronological, functional, or combination formats.
In most cases, your resume should be one page long.
Optional sections are great for adding more information to your resume, but only include them after you’ve fit all the mandatory ones.
A cover letter is a great way to add more information about yourself without extending your resume to two pages or more.
What is the Right Format to Use for a Recruiter Resume?
You likely have some experience examining resumes, and you’ve probably noticed how the good ones usually feature some sort of pattern. That pattern represents the way information is displayed, and it’s called a resume format.
There are numerous ways to construct and add sections to your recruiter resume, but three formats stand out as far more commonly used than the others. These formats are:
Common Resume Formats
The chronological resume format is the most popular by far. It’s preferred by the majority of recruiters since it puts your most recent achievements first and lists the rest in reverse-chronological order. Another benefit of this format is that it’s ATS-friendly.
The functional resume format is perfect for a recruiter resume with no experience. If you don't have any work history and you want to leverage your skills instead, this format is for you.
The combination (hybrid) resume format is a mix of the previous two, and it’s commonly used by senior recruiters. It emphasizes skills similarly to a functional format, but it supports them with comprehensive workplace accomplishments.
Resume Layout
A resume layout deals with the way your resume looks, which is as important as the information it conveys. To create a visual attention-grabber, you should follow these guidelines:
Resume Layout Guidelines
White space between sections and margins of at least 1 inch on all sides improve readability.
A resume-friendly font (Arial or Calibri as modern, sans-serif variants, for example) will ensure your resume looks professional.
By making your body of text font size 10–12 pt and your section headers 14–16 pt, you further increase the visual appeal of your resume by using hierarchy and boost its legibility.
Unless you’re a seasoned veteran with decades of experience and professional achievements, your recruiter resume should be one page long.
What Sections Should a Recruiter Resume Contain?
When it comes to writing a recruiter resume, some sections are a must, while others can be used more freely.
The must-have sections you should include in your resume are:
Must-Have Recruiter Resume Sections
Contact information
Resume objective/summary
Work experience
Education
Skills
Then, there are optional ones, such as:
Optional Recruiter Resume Sections
Courses and awards
Languages
Hobbies and interests
If you’d much rather examine other candidates’ resumes than write your own, you’re welcome to use our resume-building tool to speed things up. The software offers ready-made templates that have everything you need—you can adjust them to fit your needs with a click or two and easily add your information by filling in the blanks.
Recruiter Resume Contact Information
You should put your contact information at the beginning of your resume—in the header—and add the following details to it:
Your name
Professional title
Phone number
Email address
Location (optional)
LinkedIn profile (optional)
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Correct Example
Stephen Whitten
Recruitment Specialist
+ 210 937 5216
stephenwhitten@example.com
San Antonio, Texas
linkedin.com/in/stephenwhitten45
Here are a few more tips to help you perfect your recruiter resume contact information section:
Recruiter Resume Contact Information Tips
Your title acts as a keyword for the ATS, so it should reflect the one listed in the job ad (e.g., Human Resources Recruiter, Scientific Recruiter, Technical Recruiter, etc.).
An email address should be a professional one. A “firstname.lastname@email.com” format works much better in a business setting than something like “pr0recruiter@email.com.”
Your location is optional and should only be included if the job posting asks for it or if you’re applying abroad. Even then, list no more than your city and state.
A link to a LinkedIn profile—while optional—is highly recommended since many recruiters prefer to check the candidate’s profile there before making a final decision.
A single typing mistake can make the whole section useless, so make sure to proofread and spell-check everything.
RecruiterResume Objective or Summary
The best way to grab the attention of a hiring manager and get them to read your resume is to write a captivating opening paragraph. It acts as a short description for your recruiter resume, and it comes in two forms:
A resume objective, which is used by inexperienced candidates who want to emphasize their drive, abilities, and career goals.
A resume summary, which is written by applicants who have impressive professional achievements to showcase.
Entry-Level Recruiter Resume Objective
If you’re an entry-level candidate, you should start your resume strong by highlighting your most impressive skills, showing clear career goals, and displaying a clear drive to work with the company you’re applying to in particular.
Here’s a good example of an entry-level recruiter resume objective:
Correct Example
“Driven human resources graduate with proven experience in market research looking to join [your company] and assist in your growth. Seeking to bring my communication skills and use the integrity-first approach on the way to becoming a senior staffing recruiter.”
While this resume objective is succinct, it gives everything a hiring manager needs to see potential in a candidate.
On the flip side, here’s a bad recruiter resume objective that did neither of those things:
Incorrect Example
"I am a recent graduate looking for a recruiter position in your company to improve my skills."
Recruiter Resume Summary
As a seasoned recruitment specialist, you should strive to get potential employers' attention by showcasing your most impactful professional achievements. For best results, you should be specific and provide substantial information by including numbers and percentages in your resume summary.
Here’s a good example:
Correct Example
“Senior recruitment specialist with 7+ years of experience in candidate sourcing, screening, interviewing, and assessment. Notable achievements include improving the average time to hire at a [previous company] by up to 23% by identifying gaps in the interview funnel and designing proactive changes. Seeking to join [your company] to leverage my competence in the business and IT fields to build a strong employer brand.”
Now strip this recruiter resume summary of any concrete information, and you’ll get a vague one, like in the next example:
Incorrect Example
“Recruiter specialist with years of experience looking for a position in the field where I can use my skills to help you grow your team.”
Take a look at both examples, and you’ll quickly see why the first candidate would have the attention of hiring managers and the second one’s resume would likely get discarded.
Recruiter Resume Work Experience
One of the quickest ways to get hired is to demonstrate to potential employers how well you performed in previous positions. That’s the goal of the work experience section.
General Tips
One of the best ways to approach creating a work experience section for your recruiter resume is to outline a format to follow. That format goes like this:
Job title
Company’s name
Dates of employment
Results and achievements obtained
No Recruitment Experience
Even if you’re crafting a recruiter resume with no experience, you can create a good work history section by leveraging other types of activities, such as college projects, freelance work, volunteering, and similar.
In this example, a candidate used an internship to create a compelling work experience section:
Correct Example
Work Experience
Recruiting Intern
Smith Corporation Fort Worth, TX
February 2021–May 2022
Utilized LinkedIn Recruiter to find suitable candidates for technical roles of front-end and back-end software engineering as well as data engineering, leading to 6 hires.
Collaborated with the hiring team leaders to harmonize on-site interviews of 150+ candidates by cross-checking their availability with the availability of recruiters.
Assisted in the recruitment process of 17 new hires by taking part in their onboarding, giving them office tours, and helping with the employment paperwork.
IT Recruiter
As an IT recruiter, you should take the opportunity to demonstrate proficiency in operating computers and using relevant software in addition to your skills in communication, interviewing, assessment, etc.
Here’s an example:
Correct Example
Work Experience
IT Recruiter
AlphaSoft Madison, WI
November 2019–Current
Collaborated with the office heads of 5 different departments to understand talent needs and create a detailed screening process that cut time-to-hire by 29%.
Facilitated communication between the hiring manager and the candidates and was responsible for the coordination, which involved sending offers, interview invitations, emails, etc.
Kept email and phone contact with prospective candidates 85% of the time while maintaining an Excel spreadsheet of pipeline candidates.
Corporate Recruiter
The job of a corporate recruiter can be vastly different from that of agency recruiters. It often requires highly focused knowledge of the industry that the company—or even a specific department within a company—is in.
Corporate recruiters often work in-house and have more responsibilities than just recruiting, so you want to show that you’re ready to take on such tasks through your work experience section.
Here’s a good example:
Correct Example
Work Experience
Corporate Recruiter
Signify San Francisco, CA
December 2017–Current
Maintained staffing in 9 different offices by closely supervising the recruitment cycle.
Revised a job ad to incorporate contemporary talent trends, boosting the time to hire by up to 47%.
Wrote compelling job descriptions and composed ads for social media in collaboration with the 7-person design team to boost revenue by 12%.
Recruiter Resume Education Section
Adding an education section to your recruiter resume can be as simple as listing your degree, school or university, and dates of attendance. Let’s take a look at an example:
Correct Example
Education
Bachelor of Arts in Human Resources
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA
2016–2020
GPA: 3.8
Like in the work experience section, you can add a bulleted list of your most prominent accomplishments (a GPA of 3.5 or higher, extracurricular activities, relevant coursework, etc.) to your resume.
In general, if you have a rich professional history, you should keep your education section as brief as possible. That’s why most candidates should only list their highest degree.
On that note, you can add an unfinished degree as well. Either put “expected” next to a graduation date or replace the date with “current.”
Lastly, if you’re adding more than one degree, do so in reverse-chronological order, but skip your high school diploma unless it’s your highest one.
Recruiter Resume Skills
Next to your work experience and education, your skills represent the cornerstone of a recruiter resume. But before you start creating lists and adding them to your resume, here are a few tips to consider:
Recruiter Resume Skills Tips
It’s often best to research the job ad and the company before writing this part. Find out which skills your potential employers are looking for and compare them with yours to know which ones are the best to include in your resume.
Keep in mind that there are three different types of skills recruiters could have:
Hard skills are specific to the profession, and they are the ones hiring managers usually check out first.
Soft skills are applicable in many different settings and transferable between professions. They are also known as people skills.
ATS skills are a subtype of hard skills, and they represent competence in distinct software that recruiters use to do their job.
There are big differences between these three types of skills, so you should group and list them separately in the recruiter resume skills section.
Finally, you can prove your skills by adding them to other sections of your resume as well and linking them to relevant achievements and results.
Hard Skills
Some of the most common hard skills found on recruiter resumes are:
Prospecting
Interviewing
Job post writing
Cold calling
Email automation
CV screening
Social media
Soft Skills
Hiring managers are always looking for valuable soft skills, such as:
Communication
Critical thinking
Emotional intelligence
Problem-solving
Compassion
Negotiation
Collaboration
Teamwork
Attention to detail
Recruiter Resume Optional Sections
You can add more value to your resume or make it more personalized or tailored to the job ad with optional sections.
Courses & Awards
Attending relevant courses shows your dedication and hard work, as well as your specific knowledge in different fields.
On the flip side, awards demonstrate exceptional results that were recognized by peers in the industry.
Both awards and courses add tremendous value to your resume as long as they are relevant to the position you’re applying for.
Languages
If you’re an international recruiter, knowing foreign languages is usually a must, in which case you’ll likely decide to include this section in your resume.
Doing so is fairly straightforward, as you should simply list the languages based on your skill levels, starting with the highest one.
Hobbies & Interests
This section allows you to add a healthy dose of personality to your resume. Passion in the workplace is important, and most people would love to work with passionate and interesting individuals.
You should keep this part brief and mention something you’re truly enthusiastic about, regardless of whether it’s connected to the position of a recruitment specialist.
Should You Submit a Cover Letter With Your Recruiter Resume?
Unless a job ad says otherwise, you should definitely submit a cover letter that matches your recruiter resume.
Use 3–5 paragraphs to write about your skills and achievements that didn’t fit your resume and display your determination to work with them.
Expert Tips for Creating a Recruiter Resume
To help you make a 10/10 recruiter resume, here are several expert tips that most candidates aren’t aware of:
If you’re adding a LinkedIn profile link to your contact information section, make it clickable. You’ll make the hiring manager’s job much easier and indirectly show your attention to detail.
You should avoid using personal pronounswhen writing a resume summary/objective since the goal of these sections is to put the focus on the potential employer and show what you might bring to the company.
When writing a cover letter, try to find out who is their recruiter or hiring manager and address them personally for the biggest impact. Also, make sure that you write a unique letter specifically tailored to the position you’re applying for.
The benefits of having an error-free resume with a clear structure are multifaceted. Not only will your resume look catchy and professional, but it will also showcase your accuracy, efficiency, and attention to detail.
Closing Thoughts
With all this newfound knowledge under your belt, it won’t be long before you have your dream job and get to be the one evaluating other candidates’ resumes.
Feel free to check out the article again if you need to, and use our resume builder if you want it to do the heavy lifting for you.
The skills you've picked up here today won't just make you adept at writing resumes. Once you start working as a recruiter, they could help you while you assess the resumes of other candidates!
