Waiter/Waitress Cover Letter

The waiting staff of a restaurant is often the face of the business because they interact with customers more than anyone else.

If you can keep your customers happy while keeping up with the fast pace of a busy restaurant, you have the qualities that restaurant managers seek in a waiter or waitress.

Here are three cover letter tips for your waiter/waitress cover letter:

1. Highlight your hard and soft skills in the beginning

Working in a restaurant requires several hard and soft skills. As a waiter or waitress, you’re responsible for explaining menu items, memorising prices, and carrying plates of food — among other things.

Hard skills are job-specific abilities learnt through experience and training, such as bartending skills and point of sale (POS) systems. You can typically find the hard skills required for a position in the “Requirements” section of the job description.

The following hard skills are relevant to a wide variety of careers in the service industry:

• Computer skills
• Point of sale systems (POS)
• Knowledge of restaurant machinery
• Languages
• Knowledge of food pairings
• Food handling

Soft skills, on the other hand, are traits that positively affect how you work and interact with customers and coworkers.

Experience in industries like service and hospitality helps you develop soft skills such as teamwork and interpersonal skills. The following transferable soft skills are relevant to many careers in the service industry, so work examples of them into your cover letter to show employers you’re capable of being a waiter or waitress:

• Communication
• Multitasking
• People skills
• Flexibility
• Conflict resolution

Positions in the service industry are commonly entry-level, so showing employers ways you have these key skills helps you rank above other applicants even if you have no experience.

2. Include a bulleted list of notable service-related achievements

Employers might not have much time to read every word on the waiting staff cover letters they receive. Help them focus on your best selling points by providing a bulleted list of your professional accomplishments in the centre of your letter.

However, only include three to five achievements because you’ll also need to list achievements when you write your CV.

The best way to add achievements to your waiting staff cover letter is to highlight them using hard numbers paired with action verbs. For example:

• Achieved the Waitress of the Month award 10 times
• Was personally named and praised by customers on 80+ Google Maps reviews
• Increased sales at La Maison Blanche by 20% using effective upsale techniques

Providing context to an achievement with numbers helps the employer understand the weight of the accomplishment along with how much work you handled. Using strong action verbs conveys your expertise and proactive personality.

3. Highlight your interest in customer-facing roles

Companies require cover letters in order to understand more about their candidates outside of the content of their CVs.

Take this opportunity to add extra information about your educational background, passions, and selling points as to why you’d make the best waiter or waitress at their establishment.

In the example above, the candidate speaks about their dissertation topic and the highly relevant material they covered in it. Adding this information shows the employer that the candidate is passionate about the service industry, and took extra time and effort to further their understanding.

Knowing what to include in a cover letter is key to selling your expertise. Because waiting on people is a client-facing job, you need to prove to employers that you not only have the qualifications but also the interest to create a great dining experience for customers.

Proving that interest early on in the application process gives you the best chance of getting interviews and ultimately a job offer.