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Example Vice President Resume - Browse more resume templates and build a stand-out resume
Vice presidents are gold mines to companies with a hierarchical structure.
Everyone in the job market today knows how essential you are.
Your presence is crucial to keeping everyone accountable for their duties. And you do that in a way that motivates the group and keeps the company moving forward.
Also:
You ease communication between top-level executives and the rest of the organization. That's a great way to maintain smooth work relationships and keep a positive work atmosphere.
More importantly:
Without you, CEOs and presidents cannot maintain control over the company. They'll have a hard time accomplishing anything without you assisting their every move.
All that makes your role more critical.
But there's a problem...
Hiring the best vice president is a challenging process for most companies. It's a hard decision that needs to be made with diligence and attentiveness.
After all, a VP can make or break the company's future.
Therefore:
Recruiters are determined to notice the devil in the details whenever hiring VPs. They'll scrutinize each sentence in your resume looking for information they may find interesting.
That may put some pressure on you.
From your resume header to your certificates, everything needs to be in order.
That's exactly what we'll help you achieve today.
In this guide, you'll learn:
- The best tips and tricks to write a vice president resume that gets noticed
- Most important resume sections for vice presidents and how to write them
- Why staying relevant to the job offer is vital to making your resume more effective
- How to feature your work experience in a way that inspires recruiters
- Most sought-after technical and soft skills to include in your resume
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Vice President Resume Example
How to write an outstanding Vice President resume
Many candidates find it challenging to write a vice president's resume.
VP positions require a lot of flexibility and adaptability. So, there is no universal guide for all vice presidents to follow to make a resume.
That leaves you with no clear answers as to where to start.
If that's the case for you, don't worry!
We'll walk you through the whole process step by step in this guide.
Ready?
For starters:
You need to understand the extent of your authority so you can identify the duties you'll handle in the new role.
In many companies, a VP is the second most essential title after the CEO.
Occupying such a role puts a lot of pressure on you as a candidate. You'll have more responsibilities to handle and lots of promises to deliver on.
Other companies, such as investment banks, have a much more complicated job hierarchy.
VPs in these organizations are placed a little lower in the hierarchy with fewer duties to perform. Yet, they have the same chances to make an impact.
Once you're clear on your authority in the new company, you'll know what to focus on in your resume. You can then find a unique angle to talk about your experience and leave a solid impression.
Next:
You must find the best resume format to showcase your competence.
In our experience, we find that a reverse-chronological format is best for VP such roles.
This format allows you to highlight your expertise, skills, educational background, and certificates. Those are all key elements you must include in your resume to put you ahead of other applicants.
Finally:
Be sure to save your resume in PDF format before sending it.
The PDF format helps you reserve your resume structure with its original fonts and colors. It's also the most required format by hiring companies.
5 must-have sections for your vice president resume
- Header
- Experience
- Skills
- Education
- Certifications
What headhunters expect to see in a vice president resume
- Solid work history that highlights your executive expertise and management style
- Ability to lead, inspire, and motivate other employees to give their best
- Extensive experience in assisting the president set strategic goals and achieve them
- Quantifiable achievements to stand out from the pack and prove your competence
- Strongest soft skills to ensure your adaptability and fitness for the position
How to write an attention-grabbing vice president resume header
Job hunters often overlook resume headers for many reasons.
The one excuse we often hear people use is:
It’s a tiny section at the top of my resume. What mistakes could I make there?
Well…
It is a small section, and it only contains a few details about you. Yet, there are errors you can make that will end your job hunt before it even begins.
We’ll get to what those mistakes are in a moment — but first, let’s talk about what your header should look like.
As a rule of thumb, your resume header must feature the following:
- Full name
- Job title
- Location
- Phone number
- Email address
- LinkedIn profile
These are crucial details every headhunter will want to see at the top of your resume.
But that’s not enough...
Formatting those details in the right way is key to helping recruiters read and understand your header faster. It also allows for a simple hierarchy of information to let your name stand out and be memorable.
That’s why:
Your full name should come in a slightly bigger font so that it sticks into the hiring manager’s head.
The job title comes somewhere below it in a smaller font and a different color if you want.
The rest of the details are all equally important and must therefore come in the same font size and color.
As simple as that, you’ve formatted a professional header for your resume.
Let’s look at some examples:
Lets’ go over the mistakes in that example and show you how to fix them.
First things first:
We know that all email addresses work the same no matter what the username is.
However...
Working in a professional environment puts high demands on everything you do. That includes the email address you use.
You must feature an email address that gives a serious vibe and shows how professional you are. It’s better for the username to feature your first and last name to make it memorable.
If you don’t already have an email address with those characteristics, you can create a new one in a few minutes.
And if your preferred format is already taken, use one of the following:
- firstlast@domain.com
- first.last@domain.com
- flast@domain.com
- firstl@domain.com
- first.last@domain.com
- f.last@domain.com
- first.l@domain.com
Another way we can improve the previous example is by working on the job title a little bit.
Vice president positions are most often related to specific departments within the company.
If that’s the case for you, try to add that in your resume to increase relevance and stand out from the rest.
For example:
- Vice President of Operations
- Vice President of Sales and Marketing
- Vice President of Human Resources
- Vice President of Finance
You may also add “Senior” to your title if you have long years of experience.
How to create an experience section for your vice president resume
By the time the hiring manager reaches your resume, they’ll have read a dozen others.
Care to know they’re still looking?
Because they haven’t found a candidate that makes them go WOW!
They’ve skimmed through many resumes and still feel like they’re yet to come across the best VP they can hire.
So that’s good news and bad news for you...
The good news is that you’ve still got a chance to land the position of your dreams. All you have to do is impress the headhunters.
The bad news is that leaving a positive impression on hiring managers isn’t easy. If you follow the same path as those before you, you too will be ignored.
But don’t worry!
You’re here to learn the essential steps you must take to land a job as a vice president. That’s what we’ll help you do.
We’ll share with you our proven formula for crafting an impact-oriented experience section that gets you noticed.
There are three steps in our formula:
1- Do your homework:
Anyone copy-paste vice president job duties from Google and hope for good luck. But if you’re serious about your job hunt, you must take a better route.
You need to read carefully through the job application to identify the hiring company’s pain points. What are their challenges? Why are they hiring? And how can I be the solution?
Answering those questions helps you view things from the recruiter’s perspective so you can remain relevant to the job position.
2- Stay relevant:
Your long years of experience must have taught you endless things about your job. However, headhunters don’t have the whole day to hear about them all.
You must only pick the best, most relevant wins from your career to put in your resume.
Go through your work experience and make a list of your biggest career achievements. Then, pick the most relevant ones to feature in your experience section.
Also...
Be sure to keep everything quantifiable and easy to measure so that recruiters can see the difference between you and the others.
3- Put your skills into perspective:
It’s one thing to say that you’re a leader but another to show how you lead.
Try to integrate your ability within your career achievements. This technique helps you provide context around your work and show how those skills helped you excel at your job.
Now, let’s look at a couple of examples to help you better understand:
By applying what we learned above, you’ll take that example to another level:
Did you notice the use of action verbs at the beginning of each sentence?
Such direct language allows you to demonstrate clear causality and maintain a natural flow of words.
So, instead of using words like:
- Responsible for
- Handled
- Helped with
- Managed
Use direct action verbs relevant to your job duties:
- Secured
- Identified
- Created
- Reduced
- Upgraded
Also:
With each job duty, try to include tangible metrics and quantifiable results to support your claims. That’s an excellent way to boost your credibility.
What skills should you feature on your vice president resume?
The hiring company is looking for a vice president to handle a specific set of tasks on a daily basis.
Since you've read the job offer carefully, you already know what those needs are and what it takes to do them. That puts you steps ahead of your competition.
Now:
Highly-effective vice presidents feature two types of skills when applying to new positions:
- Hard skills
- Soft skills
Hard skills are more specific to the role and are indispensable for your success at the company. That includes skills like accounting, budgeting, management, sales, marketing, etc.
Soft skills, on the other hand, are non-technical. They're unquantifiable qualities that are determined by your personality traits and character.
This second type of skills helps you handle different tasks effectively and excel at your VP role.
You'll combine the two to make an outstanding skills section that gets you hired.
Best 8 technical skills to include on your VP resume
- Accounting
- Budget planning
- SCRUM & Agile methodology
- Finance
- Sales & Marketing
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Project management
- Data analysis
- Business development
Top 15 soft skills to showcase on your vice president resume
- Leadership
- Communication
- Decision-making
- Team building
- Motivation
- Negotiation
- Customer satisfaction
- Business planning
- Public speaking
- Training and mentoring
- Problem-solving
- Conflict resolution
- Adaptability
- Creativity
- Time management
- Multitasking
The key thing to remember here is this:
Only include your strongest, most relevant skills in your resume.
Featuring a large number of skills makes you look tentative in who you are. That hurts your chances of impressing headhunters.
Key Takeaways
- Read closely through the job offer to point out the hiring company’s needs, then use that in your resume to promote yourself as the solution
- Choose a modern resume layout and format to leave an outstanding impression on recruiters
- Find the overlap between your work experience and the new job position, then highlight that through your biggest career wins and achievements
- Showcase the most sought-after technical and soft skills to prove your fitness for the job
- Additional sections such as education and certificates are vital to making a complete resume, especially when asked for in the job application
