How important is a strong cabin crew CV (guide and examples)
Writing an effective cabin crew CV is a very critical part of your open day or assessment day at any airline. The more time you spend on planning and thinking about your transferable skills, matching and highlighting your most recent work experience to what the airline is expecting is time well spent. The main objective is to make your cabin crew CV stand out from the competition. Whether you apply online or in person, you will need to upload your most recent CV. We will discuss what you should include on a cabin crew CV and how you can use this example here to create one for yourself.
What is a cabin crew CV?
Basecase, a cabin crew CV is a marketing document that records your transferable skills and professional experience that are relevant to the airline role that you are applying for. Any unique problem solving, negotiating or decision making skill in customer service and hospitality that makes you stand out in your current role is definitely worth highlighting here. This will make you stand out as an excellent candidate for the cabin crew or flight attendant role. I tell my clients that think of your cabin crew CV as a selling document - here is your chance to promote yourself. You need to write a CV that airline employers are looking for each time they do a search on their recruitment system.
Airlines when advertising for cabin crew role highlight the core skills that they expect from the applicants.
The importance of CV keywords and phrases on your cabin crew CV
Read their job descriptions closely to identify the skills and experience they are looking for. Take a note of these skills and do a matching to your current skills and experience gained. You do not have to have a one to one match on your CV but please ensure you highlight the must haves on your CV. The must haves that all airlines insist upon are a set number of years of customer experience or hospitality experience. One airline even highlights that they require a 5 star hotel experience. If such conditions are highlighted on the airline’s job description, please ensure you match them to your experience when writing your cabin crew CV.
What CV format shall I use?
Many people ask this question in group forums and social media. On the contrary, complicated designs and formats are a hindrance to the search engines used by HR to interrogate their candidate database. They search for candidates that have the most relevant experience so with a closer match, your name will rank higher than the competition. We call this the Applicant tracking System or ATS. The ATS software strips out all formats, multi-columns and colours. It presents data to the recruiter in just raw text.
For cabin crew CVs - please keep it to two pages maximum. Please ensure you remove anything that is not relevant. Hobbies, references and earlier jobs should be removed, as these increase the denominator in the word count, and will lower your search result ranking.
What work experience should I include on my cabin crew CV?
Do not list out all your experience in your cabin crew CV. That said, you must include at least three full years of continuous experience. Always use bullet points than paragraphs. You are not a travel blog writer or journalist writing for a magazine, use of fewer words are favoured. It is harder for recruiters to read long paragraphs. Only list out experience that is relevant as transferable skills to the airline cabin crew role. It will be a great mistake to include procedures that are only relevant to say your role in a Law firm or Bank.
Start all experience on your cabin crew CV with strong verbs.
For a nurse that provides patient care, always include:
Performed daily routine clinical procedures while ensuring patient comfort and updating their medical records.
Write a career objective or personal statement for your cabin crew CV
Only include a few sentences to focus on your relevant roles, and how you see these relate to the cabin crew role and how you can benefit the airline.
We encourage you to use our CV review and writing service. I would comfortably say that 4 out of 5 of those who use our service gets shortlisted by the airline. We are comfortable with this high percentage as it means their CVs are ranking high on the recruiters’ ATS results. To book our CV writing service, click on the button below.