Hospitality and operations hiring still runs heavily through portals, agencies, and busy GMs who skim on a phone between services. Your CV has seconds. It needs clear ownership, defensible numbers, and language that matches how UK operators actually talk about the work.
This is written for supervisors through heads of operations — pubs, restaurants, hotels, contract catering, multi-site retail hospitality — not for inventing a corporate product-manager persona.
What operators scan for
In practice, readers look for:
- Scope: covers, rooms, sites, shifts, departments.
- People: team size, who reports to whom, hiring and retention.
- Commercial: revenue responsibility, GP/food cost, labour %, waste, occupancy where relevant.
- Standards: health & safety, licensing awareness, brand audits, guest scores — as facts, not slogans.
- Stability under pressure: reopenings, refurbishments, seasonal peaks, staffing shortages you actually managed.
If you led the floor but did not own the P&L, say so. Overstating commercial ownership is one of the fastest ways to fail a GM interview.
Section order that works
For most UK portal applications, keep a single-column layout:
- Contact
- Short summary (4–5 lines max) — current level + sector + strongest proof point
- Experience — reverse chronological, densest at the top
- Education / qualifications (Level 2/3 food hygiene, personal licence, degrees — only if real)
- Skills — systems and methods you used (Till, Fourth, HotSchedules, Excel, etc.)
Designed two-column CVs can look sharp for networking packs. For Indeed, Reed, and brand career sites, prefer ATS-safe exports. See What an ATS actually sees.
Writing experience bullets
Weak: “Responsible for delivering excellent guest experiences.”
Stronger (if true): “Owned evening service for 180-cover brasserie; briefed 14 FOH; held ticket times under 14 minutes on Friday peaks.”
Pattern: scope → action you owned → outcome you can evidence.
Outcomes without fiction:
- Use ranges when exact figures are confidential (“cut food waste ~15% YoY” only if you saw the report).
- Prefer operational proxies you tracked: voids, walkouts, mystery guest scores, audit grades, labour hours vs sales.
- Name brands and sites accurately — including franchise vs managed, if it changes authority.
Multi-site and progression
When you moved from one site to area or ops:
- State number of sites and travel/hybrid pattern.
- Separate “supported” vs “owned” — coaching a GM is not the same as P&L accountability.
- Call out projects: openings, menu engineering, supplier switches, rota redesigns — with dates.
Gaps and seasonal contracts are normal in the sector. Label them cleanly (“Seasonal chef de partie, summer 2022”) rather than stretching dates.
UK-specific notes
- Right to work belongs in process, not as a CV slogan, unless an employer asks for a statement.
- Spellings: organise, labour, licence (noun) — match British English in applications to UK employers.
- Agencies often parse DOCX; keep a clean DOCX and PDF. Fancy text boxes hurt both.
- References “available on request” is fine; do not paste personal referee details into a public job board CV.
Tailoring without invention
A hotel ops JD that wants “RevPAR awareness” does not require you to invent revenue management experience. If you partnered with sales on group blockages, say that. If you never touched RevPAR, emphasise occupancy-adjacent work you did (upsell routines, breakfast conversion) or leave the gap.
Same rule for tech stacks: listing every PMS you once saw in a demo is noise. List systems you logged into weekly.
A one-hour refresh checklist
- Export plain text; fix anything a parser jumbles.
- Rewrite the top two roles with scope + people + one commercial or quality metric you can defend.
- Cut three adjectives (“dynamic”, “passionate”, “results-driven”).
- Align skills to the JD only where true.
- Prepare two STAR stories for interview that match the new top bullets.
When you want a structured audit before you apply — readability, ATS rules, round-trip — use the free Kandid audit. It will not invent covers or GP percentages for you.