| Dear Headhunter or Human Resources Officer,
It’s true, the smiley individual who sits before you, restaurant resumé in hand, may not have the exact qualifications for which you and your job posting are seeking. However, he or she deserves a serious second look. Servers are underrated in the broader work world. For reasons of rigid resumé protocol, many of their unsung skills are missing. Not the underexposed, one-dimensional dullard your job posting risks selecting, this fascinating example of the server sector is well-rounded, creative, resourceful and offers an exemplary work ethic. Try to find a candidate more widely skilled and interesting. I dare you.
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
· Pre-restaurant Jobs: Summers of tree-planting or student painting.
· Boot Camp Training: Moxie’s, 4th Street Rose, Earl’s, or The Keg – which provides a humbling experience to which every adult should be subjected for a minimum of 30 days. (Beware the claim to serving experience one summer in New Zealand or tending bar in England. Probably didn’t happen.)
· Intermediate & Fine Dining: Several years work in a Banff hotel; return to Calgary to family-run ethnic establishment; lateral move to one of Calgary’s top 10 restaurants.
· Other: Repeated promotions to shift-leader or manager; two years serving in Cayman Islands; at least one work contract at a winery; hired as an extra or a grip in Wild West feature film.
EDUCATION
Completing a real estate licence and the Canadian Securities Course; likely taken massage therapy and beginner iridology; wine sommelier; third-year law school or enough courses combined to make up a graduate degree in general studies.
RELATED SKILLS AND ABILITIES
· Sales: Enthusiastic descriptions elevate fish eggs to delicate caviar, thyroid glands to hearty sweetbreads, duck liver to foie gras de canard; supports customers in maintaining special diet or provides rationalization for blowing it altogether.
· Problem-solving skills: Plunged numerous overflowing toilets, has saved one life from choking; successfully expedites inebriated customers to taxicab.
· Computer skills: Remanco, Squirrel, Posi-touch, Micros, Maître D’ and more.
· Highly tuned skills of perception: Can cover the tracks of a sloppy extramarital lunch affair; doesn’t draw attention to customer tears, on-site relationship breakups or declined credit cards.
· Interpersonal skills: Can (and has) talked his or her way out of a pillowcase; has breathed through more verbal abuse than anyone; tactfully talks customer out of the red and into white Chardonnay; survived the inanity of customer-always-right ideologies.
· Multi-tasking: Can execute more than 11 server tasks at once while heating baby bottles of milk to a perfect temperature and shaking up a perfect mojito.
· Maturity: Wild oats successfully sown; thrill-seeking satisfied through skydiving and paintball; endured nepotistic, untrained or psychologically unstable management; recovered from at least one addiction – twice.
HOBBIES AND INTERESTS
Backpacked through Europe and twice been to Thailand; Open-water diving ticket; plays at least one instrument; enjoys yoga, wine tasting, rock climbing, snowboarding, foreign films and Yahtzee. |
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