Great Resume tips for buyer roles
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Buyer roles are often someone’s first foray into the world of supply chain and as such getting the initial step done right, the dreaded application and resume, can help put you out in front of the competition. Here are our top tips for fine-tuning your resume to give you the best opportunity at snagging that dream buyer job.
What does a buyer do?
Before anything, it’s important to consider the role that you’re applying for. By understanding the requirements you’ll be better equipped in tuning your resume. A buyer will typically be part of the sourcing process, finding suppliers for parts/products, handling lower level pricing discussions, raising purchase orders, reconciling order books and being the first line of communication between buyer and supplier.
Buyer roles can be a great introduction into Supply Chain, many careers can be started in buyer roles with the incumbent then working thier way up.
What do people look for on a resume
It’s important to remember that in reality most resume’s are skimmed, with readers looking for key data about you and your capabilities.
1/ Keywords: Information about your skillset
Due to the fact that resumes are often not read in detail but are skimmed. Recruiters will tend to scan through a resume picking out the key skills that apply to the role that they are recruiting for and points of interest in the previous experience that will support the candidate in the new role. Let’s break down the skills that a buyer has
* Research
* Negotiation
* Analytical skills
* Excellent communication skills
* A decision maker
* Good at working under pressure
Within your resume, see how you can include the relevant keywords whilst also describing why you excel at these skills. Remember that they are most likely looking for someone that can hit the ground running so winning them over on the core attributes is often crucial.
Employers want value, try and summarize your key value that you’d bring to the organization. What problems can you help them solve? For example, you might be an “excellent decision maker when faced with supplier selection problems, you are able to analyze RFP responses and negotiate agreements that benefit the buying organization.” In that short sentence, we’ve included a number of key words and describe why you’d be excellent in the job.
One word of caution is to remember your audience, don’t try and add things in that aren’t relevant or worse still add skills that you are not experienced in. If you get called for interview and you are quizzed on these it might prove uncomfortable!
2/ Career History
You’ll either be in the position of having previous buyer experience or you’ll be new to the role.
If you have previous experience pull out the key aspects that you believe relate to the role your applying for. What did you do before – what worked well, what skills did you develop.
if you are new to buying look to describe how your key skills learned from other roles (communication for example) translate into the world of procurement.
3/ Keep it simple
There’s various chatter about keeping your resume down to one page, they’re arguments for and against this. The key is do not over elaborate, Ensure everything within the resume is appropriate to the role you’re applying for, and of course recent. Where describing previous roles adds weight to your application do so simply.
In Summary
At the end of the day, a resume is a sales pitch. You’re trying to get through the door to that magical job interview. To do so you need to ensure you make yourself as appealing as possible to the potential recruiter. To an extent you need to ignore the competition and focus on what you do well and sell yourself as well as you can.