Highlight your skills with a Chief Operating Officer resume
A company’s customers, partners, and other stakeholders may often see a different face on PR materials and media, but the Chief Operating Officer (COO) is the one who keeps the business’s operations smooth and seamless. A COO coordinates everyday operations to ensure the flow of products, services, and internal systems. Without the operational prowess of the COO, the business can compromise its goals, timelines, and working relationships.
Hiring the right person for the job will spell the difference in the company’s survival and success. Your skills and experience, as well as your integrity and sense of leadership, are critical to the chief operating officer role. Present your capabilities clearly by using Resumeble’s COO resume template. Check our collection of COO resume samples designed to highlight your operational management skills.
Creating your COO resume
Learn how to craft a professional COO resume that impresses hiring managers and helps you land your dream job.
What should you write in a resume for a COO position?
A chief operating officer is typically second in command to the chief executive officer. The COO oversees daily operations, sets business strategies, and essentially charts the growth path of the organization. Among their common responsibilities are:
- Updating the CEO on important company information, developments, and events
- Setting corporate goals, plans, strategies, and processes
- Establishing long-term operational and financial procedures
- Supervising business operations and manpower needs
- Setting performance and growth targets and ensuring their fulfillment
So, what do recruiters want to see in your resume?
When creating a resume for your COO application, you must keep in mind your resume objectives. Your credentials must show or prove that you can handle these responsibilities. In addition, provide anecdotal information about work experiences that highlight your integrity, strong leadership and organizational skills, smart decision-making, solid problem-solving capabilities, interpersonal and communication skills, and a clear career projection.
COO resume example
If you’re wondering how long a resume should be, as a rule of thumb, your COO resume:
- Must be 2 pages long, with not too much white space, but still easily readable. Since this is a senior-level executive position, it’s expected that your experience must be extensive, and therefore, your resume must reflect that
- Must be headed by an executive summary that highlights achievements relevant to the role/industry
- Must include 5-7 sections that present your key competencies
- Must be accompanied by a compelling cover letter
A big part of your resume must expound on how your leadership and management in the organizations you worked for improved operations in those companies. Instead of stating only what you did, explain how your role and solutions contributed to better results for your team or the company.
The best resume writing services can help you with the general resume format, but the impact of what you write here is really up to you. Consider your COO resume as your main tool in promoting yourself. It must package your work history, educational background, and relevant qualifications in one handsome bundle that your prospective employer can quickly assess. It must be compelling, strategically written for the COO role, and shows how you can drive the same success for your prospective employer.
Here’s a sample resume outline you can follow:
Contact Information
On the topmost part of your resume, provide an easy way for a hiring manager to contact you. Apart from your full name, include a working phone number and a professional email address.
Executive Summary
This section must set the tone for the rest of your resume. It must show your authority, leadership style, and results-driven mindset. In three to four sentences, highlight certain professional skills and expertise, letting hiring managers know your abilities at a glance. Include your years of experience in operations and executive leadership, industry focus or expertise, and strengths that became your management signature (i.e., cost optimization).
Example:
Results-oriented COO with 10+ years of experience driving operational efficiency in logistics and fleet management. Proven record of streamlining processes and optimizing costs to achieve a double profit increase.
Key Achievements
Provide evidence of past successes, particularly quantifiable results. Highlight things like operational cost savings, revenue growth percentages, process improvements, or successful restructuring initiatives.
- Lowered operating costs by 35% through automation and transitioning to a remote workforce
- Increased company productivity by 30% by restructuring more than 10 operating procedures
Core Competencies/Areas of Expertise
It’s important to underscore your core competencies or areas of expertise as a COO to give hiring managers an idea of your strengths as an executive. Enumerate your most relevant qualifications or capabilities. At this point, use keywords to optimize your resume for applicant tracking systems (ATS).
Highlight such things as:
- Change management
- Lean operations
- Cross-functional leadership
- KPI development
- Contract negotiations
- P&L management
Writing them in bullets improves readability and easy scanning.
Professional Experience with a Strategic Focus
Your resume needs an experience section where you can showcase your vast knowledge of multiple business aspects. Here, it’s not just what you did that matters, but also how you contributed at a strategic level. As an aspiring COO, you must demonstrate your experience and ample expertise in working in or with various departments, such as marketing, sales, finance, human resources, and legal.
Highlight your capacity to work easily with your peers, whether top executives or subordinates. Mention past titles and employers, and their corresponding duties and employment dates, prioritizing positions related to operations. Use keywords like staff management, strategic planning, business development, supervisory skills, and operations management. You may apply the STAR (situation, task, action, result) method for impact. You may start with the most relevant or the most recent.
- Collaboration with board members, CFO, and CTO
- Cross-functional roles in Research & Development and Production
Education and Professional Development
Of course, there must be a section on educational background and further training. Credentials show qualifications and commitment to growth. The higher your educational background and the more continuing education/training you pursue, the more credible you’ll become.
Include relevant degrees, certification courses, diploma courses, and other forms of relevant formal training you received, as well as the institutions where you received them.
- MBA
- Advanced degrees
- Executive training programs
- Industry certifications like Six Sigma and PMP
Board and Advisory Roles
Based on job market trends, the above sections may suffice. But since you’re applying for a COO position, any roles you held that emphasize your readiness for the job will increase your chances of being considered. If you’ve held any position in company boards or committees, it’s best to mention this in a separate section.
A collection of such roles adds credibility to your claim and shows your influence beyond one company circle. Highlight nonprofit board memberships, specific advisory positions, and committee leadership roles.
Soft Skills & Leadership Traits
Soft skills will be most helpful in your bid to get a chief operating officer job, as COOs are supposed to be people-focused as much as they are process-focused. Your capability to address people-related aspects within the organization says a lot about how you could manage both human and non-human resources.
Highlight your expertise in conflict resolution, communication, talent development, mentoring/coaching, and cultural transformation leadership. Relate past incidents to support your skills.
With the above outline and structure, you’re ready to create your resume for the COO role you want. You can use an AI-based resume builder, or you can write your resume with the help of our COO template and samples.
Cover letter for your COO resume
We’re sure your COO resume is stellar. But we recommend you cap it with an equally compelling cover letter to introduce yourself. A cover letter is your secret weapon for turning a good resume into a job-winning application. It is particularly useful for executive role applications, where strategy, communication, and leadership skills must shine.
A cover letter is important because:
- It adds context and tells your story in minutes.
- It shows that you’ve researched the company and are genuinely interested in it.
- It demonstrates your executive communication skills.
- It can highlight cultural fit, answering a prospective employer’s question on whether you can work with the team.
- It can fill gaps (in your resume) and add depth.
- It can establish a personal connection.
What is included in a COO resume cover letter?
- Header –your contact information, the date, and the employer's details
- Opening Greeting – contains the hiring manager's name, if you know it
- Introduction - states your interest in the COO position and a brief description of your leadership experience
- Executive Experience and Achievements - highlights your past successes and initiatives that demonstrate your qualifications and value to the company
- Closing and Call to Action - a strong closing statement that repeats your interest in the role and invites the hiring manager to discuss this opportunity in further detail
COO resume do’s and don’ts
Here are a few reminders on what to do and not to do when creating a chief operating officer resume:
DO
- Be honest about your skills and experience
- Start with the most important and relevant achievements and experiences, the ones you’re most proud of
- Create a summary of your most prominent and memorable COO-related roles that showcase your capabilities
- Include soft skills and tangential roles that support your key competencies and expertise
- Include employment dates in the Professional Experience section, together with your official titles and responsibilities
- Use professional or industry keywords that will get your resume noticed by applicant tracking systems
DON'T
- Pad your resume with irrelevant skills or non-existent ones
- Write down real-life examples of professional experiences that are not yours
- List down credentials randomly without organizing them from the most important/relevant to the least important achievement
- Include other personal details on top of your contact information
- Include every other job you’ve had since graduation that has nothing to do with your operations-related stint
- Send your resume without proofreading it. Grammatical and spelling errors can be a deal breaker, even though your credentials are gold.
Your next executive role starts with a winning COO resume
Let our team of executive resume writers help you position your achievements and vision with clarity and authority.