Your first step should be the research of your role, job duties, industry and employers to get better insight into current trends and job market scenario. With this, you will be able to present your profile on resume strategically.
Next step is to choose the right resume format that provides the layout to present your profile most efficiently. Your options are functional, reverse chronological & hybrid.
Once you have chosen the format, you can start writing your event manager resume with the guidelines discussed below in mind.
Professional resume guidelines
- Use third person, past tense
- Use maximum action verbs and numbers to quantify the details
- Use simple label for document: Your name Resume
- Use compatible document format: Word or PDF
- Choose the right format
- Edit the margins & white space for symmetry and visual appeal
- Proofread the resume and remove every grammatical, spelling and factual errors
Accurate contact information
- Your full name
- Your contact number with area code
- Your professional email address
- Your LinkedIn profile link
- Your portfolio link
Ensure the accuracy of these details so that the recruiter can check out your portfolio and contact you successfully for any communication required for hiring process. After this section, the real strategical profile presentation will begin with the resume objective or summary section.
Compelling summary statement
Resume summary should be written in bullet points around 3 to 5, make sure you mention your role in the beginning as well.
While describing the resume summary, you need to mention the total years of experience, a little background, your most notable achievements and most important skills, any recognitions and awards and anything else that might be highlight worthy in your profile as an event manager.
You should end by describing what kind of opportunity you are looking for and how you will contribute to the client at your next project with your skills and experience.
Work history description
While describing your work history, use bullet points, mention your role or job title, employer name and the employment period. You should also describe the work history in the reverse chronological manner.
While describing the experience, you need to talk about every responsibility that you handled from coordination to budget planning and event execution. You should also include relevant skills for the role in between in a way that backs your claim of experience aspects.
You should also talk about your most notable achievements and exceptional performances or any instances that helped you showcase your skills and knowledge.
The experience section should be thorough and inclusive of all details of the experience, no matter how small because that will help you cover the keywords and also help you reflect your professionalism.
Education section
There may not be any directly related degrees for event management, however you can mention your high school diploma, any degrees you may have acquired and any courses you may have completed.
What you need to do is mention the relevant aspects of your degrees and courses along with any relevant subjects you might have had that helped you acquire the knowledge and skills required for event management.
You need to mention your course or degree name and the educational institute from where you acquired it, you can also mention the year if it has been a long time although avoid mentioning the year in case you are a recent graduate.
Event manager skills
You have already talked about your skills in the summary and experience sections as well as the education section so why create a separate section for skills?
Well, the skills section will have a list of your top most strengths instead of the generic skills described in sentences. This helps you highlight your skills properly along with impressing the hiring manager with your top most strengths to perform well in your role as an event manager or event planner.
You should try to include all the relevant skills throughout your resume but choose the most important ones for your skills section and make sure you pick the skills from the job description as well because they are the skills that the hiring manager is looking for on your event manager resume.
- Vendor management
- Catering management
- Leadership skills
- Meeting the client expectations
- Cultural awareness
- Strong organizational skills
- Venue selection
- Wedding planner skills
- Managing teams
- Hospitality management
- Facility management
- Achieving customer satisfaction
- Lead generation
- Team management
- Budget management
- International events
- Event strategies
- Soft skills
- Project management
- Communications skills
- Event planners skills
- Organizing events
- Executing successful events
- Event planning
- Event management
Extra
Do you have anything extra to offer? Administrative skills, management experience or interest? Or perhaps are you working in the direction to become an event director one day?
The extra sections are for the extra information that should not included in the sections we discussed above but should be mentioned nonetheless because of relevance.
You might work with many people while managing an event, if you spoke more than one language, you might be able to communicate better will the people who might not speak English exclusively and you will not need a translator either. So if you have various language proficiencies that you can mention on your event manager resume, you can create a section for that information.
If you have any experience or personal interest in the field of management, administration, finances-budgeting or anything else that may be relevant, you should mention that as well because since you have personal interest in these fields, you are likely to acquired knowledge and skills for those aspects of the event planning, event planner job as well as event manager job responsibilities. And that can be great value addition to your profile of event manager.
If you have attended any seminars, events, workshops or acquired any online courses and programs or acquired any training or worked with any prominent and notable group or agency or person, you should mention those details in a separate section as well.
These details help you stand out from the pool of job applicants who are likely to have similar experience as skills as you but not these extra exposure and advantage. This is your strategy to increase your chances of getting hired.
Making a portfolio
An event manager is likely to have a lot of experience with event management, now events are something that you can put on display with photographs and videos, and your skills of management of budget and event and other aspects of event management can be put on display with the help of data charts and so on.
Making a portfolio is important because it showcases your experience in a way that is more believable with instant evidences of the events that you have managed well and successfully. The successful events that you managed would have also provided you with good feedback which can be included in your portfolio as well.
A portfolio can also include your own ideas and event concepts to offer to the clients who are looking for your insights and suggestions. Your event manager portfolio will help you impress the recruiter as well as your future clients which is why you should have a carefully curated and details portfolio. And you need to mention the link of this portfolio on your event manager resume as well.
To create the portfolio, you can use your own website that showcases everything related to your event management skills and experience along with your creativity and ideas. You can also use a simple google drive folder to store everything together in case you don't have the resources to create a website right away.
And another free and easy to use option is a profile on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. You can write a detailed bio of who you are and your experience and what you can offer, you can provide the photographs and videos of successfully executed events that you managed and other data regarding budgets and event concepts and so on.
Beating the ATS
Have you heard of various artificial intelligence driven software that are used by the recruiters for sorting the job applications they receive?
The right term for those is the applicant tracking systems or the ATS, they are software that run on artificial intelligence and scan the resumes and job applications. It can also process the data received in job applications apart from resume and cover letter when the data is entered on a specific job application portal.
With the remote work opportunities booming, immigration at its peak, the after-Covid times have seen the improved job markets for almost every industry. Which means there are more opportunities now more than ever, this is also because now the resources to acquire an expertise necessary for particular profession, are now easily accessible and available for almost everyone.
Now as the consequence of all this, the recruiters of companies whether small or big, always receive applications in the range of hundreds, thousands and more! So how can one recruiter or even a team of 5-7 people of HR management can sort through all those applications manually, it would increase the time investment necessary and with it the margin of error due to lack of energy to keep up the pace.
All of this led to the use of ATS that works on the basis of set parameters. The parameters are set by the recruiter and then on the basis of those parameters the ATS scans, filters and shortlists the resumes and job applications fed to it.
Now what are these parameters, none other than the keywords. The keywords related to your role as event manager, keywords related to job description of your position, keywords related to the industry of event management, keywords related to potential employers that you are applying the job to and everything in between.
You need to use these keywords throughout your event manager resume and make sure the keywords are used in sensible and meaningful manner as well. Using the keywords is not difficult, you just need to keep them in mind and use them while describing your experience, skills and other details on the event manager resume, since they are related to your position and job description, it will not be difficult to use them throughout your event manager resume.
You need to avoid stuffing the keywords in random places as well as unnecessary amount of repetition of keywords in your event manager resume. You need to maintain the readability and meaning of the content for easy comprehension as well as desired impact.
If you do not avoid all this, the recruiter will easily figure out what you have done. The use of keywords in strategic and intentional manner is a subtle tactic and should not be obvious for the reader as it compromises your attempt to reflect professionalism on your event manager resume.
- Event planning
- Event manager
- Event management
- Corporate events
- Event managers
- Event manager skills
- Event planner
- Event planners
- Event coordinator
- Successful events
- International live events association
- Award winning event manager
- Proven track record
- Special events
- Event attendance
- Project management
- Event success
- Fast paced environment
- National association
- Events create
- Multiple events
- Client events
- Event strategies
- Event manager role
- Event concepts
- International events
- Event funding
- Event budgets
- Post event activities
- Event portfolio
- Third party vendors
- Team management
- Lead generation
- Hospitality management
- Facility management
- Wedding planner
- Client expectations
- Vendor management
Writing an intriguing cover letter
Writing a cover letter may seem like a tiresome task and you might wonder if you 'really have to write a cover letter or not' to enclose in your job application along with your event manager resume.
It might be tiresome however, writing a cover letter can go a long way. There are many benefits of writing a cover letter especially if you customize the cover letter for various job applications.
A cover letter has the body a lot like the regular letter with the date, address of the recipient, subject, letter body and at last signature on the left. The cover letter can be written in a bit of informal way as opposed to the formal tone of your event manager resume, which allows you to make a different and important impact on the hiring manager.
Cover letter allows you to talk about your skills, experience and knowledge with more context, with few exceptional instances that may have been the high points of your career and also how you performed well and coped with the challenges.
You can also talk about your inspiration of getting into the field of event management, your journey and your experiences, your goals in the future and so on because such information will convince the hiring manager of your passion, dedication and competency for the event manager job.
To maximize the impact on the hiring manager, you may want to look up the HR manager and address them with their name on the letter which will further personalize the letter which is surely going to make the HR manager see your event manager resume with better regard.
To understand how to write a cover letter, you should refer to our wide range of cover letter examples that showcase the best possible ways of writing the letter to the hiring manager in a way that makes the desired impact and gets you the much awaited interview call.
Finding opportunities
To find opportunities of event manager positions, you might want to understand the most important resources. When you are looking for a good event manager position, you can look at various social media platforms as well as job boards and any other source that you can think of.
Apart from those, one of the crucial resource is your network, you should make use of your professional network and find out if there is anyone who might have come across such an opportunity and whether they can recommend you or steer you in the right direction to get that opportunity.
On social media, Instagram is filled with various event managers and event planning agencies that may be looking to hire new people. You can find such profiles and directly message them, telling them about your experience and inquiring if they have any open position that may be suitable for you. Instagram is the one platform where most of the people across the globe are active and showcase their personal and professional life both, including their businesses and more.
The most important platform for job seekers is the LinkedIn, it has all the potential employers as well as the employees. You can follow the various hash tags related to your job (you can also use this tactic on Instagram) and the hash tag 'open to work' to come across any relevant posts regarding hiring and event manager job.
Another way to browse jobs is to use the 'search jobs' feature on LinkedIn, you can apply the filters for what kind of a job you are looking for and then apply to the jobs which's job description is appealing for you.
You can also upload a post on LinkedIn stating you are open to work and looking for event manager opportunities. Ensure that you add relevant hash tags and turn on the 'open to work' frame on your profile so that the hiring managers can come across your profile easily through LinkedIn's algorithm.
Conclusion
In conclusion, your event manager resume should reflect professionalism and showcase your skills and experience in the most efficient manner possible so that the hiring managers will be impressed enough to give you a shot at the opportunity and invite you over for an interview.
To do that, you need to follow the guidelines that we laid out in the article above along with following tips for writing each sections so that the right information is highlighted on your event manager resume. A professional resume will impress the hiring managers enough to pay attention to your resume and add your resume to their shortlist and the efficient presentation of your profile will convince them of your competency and valuable candidacy for the open position that they are looking to fill up.
While writing a professional resume, you need to take care of visual appeal as well as the strategic presentation of the content of your event manager profile. Which means you need to ensure the symmetry of white space and margins, maintain the font sizes and colors in a manner that increases the visual appeal.
To increase the visual appeal, you can also take advantage of various event manager resume template that have certain themes to them that adds to the visual appeal of your event manager resume.
When you are done, do not forget to proofread your event manager resume, however before you get down to writing your event manager resume, you may want to check out event manager resume examples to get even more insight into what it looks like.
We have a great collection of resume examples, resume templates, resume writing guides for every profession and also guides on job search! Go check it out! And good luck with the job search!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Do I need a finance background for budget management skills on my event manager resume?
You may not require the finance background however your ability to manage budget and executing events as expected by the client is very important hence you will need the skill of budget management on your event manager resume.
How long should my event manager resume be?
A standard resume should be 1 to 2 pages long hence your event manager resume should not extend to 3rd page either.
Which are the top event manager resume skills?
We have discussed many skills in the various sections above, the top skills that you might not want to miss out on your event manager resume, are:
- Event management
- Event planning
- Corporate events management
- Special events
- Charity events
- Event registration
- Organizing events
- Communication skills
