Barista CV Example

If you want to impress employers with your barista CV, you have to make sure your qualifications are well and clearly represented. Cafe owners are looking for candidates with strong people skills who can bring excellent customer service to the floor and increase sales.

These tips will show you how to use the sections on your CV to highlight exactly what employers want to see.

1. Write a strong personal statement

Employers at popular cafes often go through loads of applications to find the right candidate, so it’s important to make sure your CV is written to get their attention right from the beginning.

One of the first things employers will see on your CV is your personal statement, so it’s important you pay particular attention to this section. The purpose of your personal statement is to interest employers by briefly summarising your strongest qualifications for a position.

So, your task here is to condense your professional achievements and skills into just three to four sentences (or bullet points) that represent you as a candidate.

Here’s an example of a personal statement for a barista CV:

Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety certified barista with 3+ years of experience serving a high volume of customers in a fast-paced environment. Recognised by management for consistently delivering exceptional quality service as well as product. Trained 4 other junior baristas to cafe standards. Seeking to use excellent customer service and interpersonal skills to drive sales at Grinder while gaining new opportunities to grow in the coffee industry.

This example works well because it draws a reader’s attention to the candidate’s strengths: their relevant certification, years of experience, professional achievements, and exceptional skills.

By writing a personal statement that showcases the best of your CV, you can strengthen your position to compete with other applicants for an interview.

2. Highlight your work experience

When it comes to writing an impressive work history section, how you write about your work experience is just as important as the experience that you include. Here are a couple of ways to ensure that your work history section makes the best possible impression:

Use action verbs

Beginning your bullet points with passive language like “tasked with” or “responsible for” won’t make much of an impression on anyone. Luckily, this is an easy pitfall to avoid. All you have to do is make sure you start each sentence with an action verb.

Action verbs describe how you did something, and provide employers with a much more concrete idea of what kind of employee you are. They make you appear more proactive while also making your CV a more engaging read.

Here’s an example of a passive work history point:

• Responsible for arranging and maintaining stock in the pastry case

Now here’s that same point expressed using action verbs:

• Organised the pastry case to enhance product placement, maintain stock and drive sales using aesthetically pleasing arrangements

Here are some action verbs to use on your barista CV:

Memorise	Increase	Promote	Upsell	Recommend
Handcraft	Serve	Cater	Prepare	Deliver
Provide	Produce	Operate	Sanitise	Train

Quantify your experience

Another way to strengthen your work history section is by using hard numbers that quantify your achievements. Adding numbers, where possible, helps give employers a tangible picture of what you’ve accomplished and what benefits you can bring to their business.

Here’s an example of a work experience bullet point that uses numbers:

• Memorised 100+ tea, coffee, and cocoa beverages and served 150–200 customers per shift

This is much more effective than simply writing “prepared coffee, tea, and cocoa beverages and served them to customers”, which is less informative. Adding numbers helps demonstrate the level and quality of the candidate’s experience.

3. Showcase your relevant skills

When you’re deciding on the skills to list on your CV, you should consider the specific job you’re applying for as well as your experience. Being a barista requires a mix of hard and soft skills, and the skills that you want to showcase will vary depending on how much experience employers are looking for.

Your barista hard skills are the technical abilities you’ve learned through training or experience. If you’re applying for a barista position at a speciality or upscale coffee shop you should emphasise your hard skills.

Employers at these types of coffee shops are more likely to be looking for technically skilled baristas who already have a strong foundation of coffee knowledge and who can ensure excellent quality.

Of course, if you don’t have much coffee experience to speak of, many employers will still be willing to hire candidates with the right set of soft skills who they can train. The ability to provide exceptional customer service is just as important as the quality of the product.

Here are some hard and soft barista skills to include on your CV:

Barista Hard Skills	Barista Soft Skills
Coffee brewing methods	Customer service skills
Coffee and tea knowledge	Verbal communication
Milk steaming	Sales
Latte art	Interpersonal skills
Espresso machine operation	Friendliness
Kitchen and coffee equipment maintenance	Time management
Food hygiene certification	Reliability
POS systems	Multitasking
Cleaning	Working well under pressure
Foreign language skills	Attention to detail

4. Use the responsibilities listed in the job advert to write your CV

One of the best ways to make sure your CV makes a good impression on employers is to target the specific job you’re applying for with your barista CV.

To target a job effectively, you should take careful note of the barista responsibilities listed in the job advert, as well as other keywords that indicate particular skills an employer is looking for. Once you know what these are, you can use them as a guide.

When writing your barista CV, you should try to include as much of the same language as appears in the job advert as possible.

Here’s an example of some barista responsibilities from a job advert:

To target this position, here’s an example of how you can write your work experience section with the keywords used in bold:

By using the same keywords mentioned in the job advert, the candidate immediately informs the employer that they’ve got the required qualifications and experience for the position. Targeting the position in this way greatly increases your chances of getting phoned for an interview.