Your call center resume decides your interviewer's first impression on you. If you get it wrong, you wouldn't get an interview. Even if you would, your bad resume will already discredit you in a way. In short, you wanna pay attention to your resume if you want the job. Here's a complete guide and example on how to write an effective resume for call center applicants that gives you a better chance in landing your job plus, a free call center resume download in the end.
Parts of a Call Center Resume
1. Heading
Heading contains your name, address, email address and mobile number.
2. Objective
The position you're to applying for. Just write, "A ___ position."
3. Education
Don't include your high school and elementary school. It wastes space and isn't relevant anyway.
If you've attended more than one courses during college, feel free to include them. But if you've attended a lot like ten, you might wanna cut it down and exclude the irrelevant ones.
4. Work Experience
Include the position you held, start and end month and year of your involvement, the name of the company, and the address. Make sure the dates and the years are dated correctly. JP Morgan and other bank call centers are very strict with discrepancies with your job timeline.
Also, if there's a big gap of unemployment between two jobs, prepare an explanation about it. Some employees can be suspicious about about where you were during your unemployment.
For instance, when I told my interviewer that I chose not to work for several months after I quit my job last January, he looked at me like I have two heads. The idea seemed so foreign to him he would have declared I was an alien right then and there.
If you have no job experience, put your summer jobs, internships, and any other activities you've joined in that shows you're a responsible human being and have contributed or accomplished something.
5. Profile
This is where usually all interviewers' eyes land. Profile is a brief summary of the experiences you've had in your career or anything that relates to the job you're applying in.
For someone who held a service crew position, here's an example of what you can put in your professional profile:
"Handled the overall general, customer service, and sales  tasks in the tea store: cleaning, making inventories, serving customers, and aiming a sales quota of Php5,000.00 daily."
Concise, brief, everything in one sentence. Also, start the sentence with an action word. It easily registers and doesn't take a long to process for a busy interviewer.
For an applicant with no job experience:Â Include the awards you received in school, some of the organizations you've joined in, your skills and everything you're proud of that relates or could contribute to the job you're applying for.
Optional
Skills
I don't include this in my call center resume because Profile already sums up the skills I have that are related to a call center job application. If you're good at singing or dancing, I see no point including those unless you're applying to become a singer or dancer.
Hobbies
Even if your hobby is somewhat related to the position you're applying for, consider leaving it out. Unless your hobby is super cool and super related to call center jobs, I don't think you should take up more space for this. Even if your hobby is super cool, you can instead save it for your interview. It will come in handy once the interviewer asks, "Tell me something about yourself that isn't on your resume." And yes, they ask this.
How to Write an Effective Call Center Resume for Beginners
Overall, here's what you need to remember: you need to make the interviewer's life easier. Convenience. They love it. They have more things to think about. That said,
1. Keep it straightforward and simple.
Economy of words. Don't express a five-sentence thought when you can express just the same in one clear sentence. A long call center resume doesn't always mean it's good.
Interviewers don't appreciate reading a long resume full of fluff. Fluff is a long piece of writing that's consists of big, fancy, complicated words, but overall lacks substance. Bosses are hammering interviewers to get more qualified people on-board as they can. They barely have time for complicated words.
2. Keep it eye-friendly and scannable.
Interviewers don't read your resume word by word. Instead, they scan it as fast as their tight schedules can allow. They look for keywords. So you want to highlight the important and relevant parts. That said, I've created a call center resume sample for you to download. It includes the proper alignment, headings, and formats, and some pop of colors if you like to print it colored.
Click here to access and download the free resume sample.
If you want a simpler, more basic kind of formatting:
Click here for a more basic format sample.
Remember that there are thousands of ways to format a call center resume. Search it in Google and you'll see them from basic to customized ones. Choose what suits you. It all boils down to one thing: make it easy for the interviewer to absorb what's in your resume and notice the important things she should notice about you.
Is a call center resume really that Important when applying for call center jobs?
It depends.
I wouldn't say that a kickass call center resume resume is all what it takes to get the job. For one thing, you need to polish your English from accent, pronunciation, grammar, down to the very last detail.
But note:
Several times in a year, call center companies hire like crazy—for instance, on April and May, new graduates look for jobs, and around November and December, customers buy a lot leading to high volume of calls.
During these times, they need more agents, and they're desperate to hire anyone who knows how to speak English. In this case, they could care less about your resume.
But there are times, when they aren't hiring that much numbers. This is the time when landing a job offer is tougher. They put more emphasis on resumes and strict standards— things they would have ignored when they're mass hiring.
Conclusion:
A diligent applicant prepares for the worst. That said, why don't you take the time to polish your resume now? It barely takes an hour and it will benefit you in the long run. Hope this helps.
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