Administrative Assistant Resume

About This Resume

Administrative assistants spend much of the week making other people look organized, from clean documents to calendars that never double-book. Good office support is so quiet that it's easy to leave off the page entirely. Your resume has to get you past a hiring manager and into an interview, and it can only do that if the quiet work shows. The sample and tips below show how.

Administrative assistants are an underrated group. In fact, many of them run budgets, events and software changes that never show up in their job titles. That hidden work is what hiring managers look for first, along with the programs you use every day and how much of the office's money passes through your hands.

What to Include

• The people you support, by level and number, such as three directors or a 40-person department
• Calendar, travel and meeting work, with the size of the meetings or events you've planned
• Money you handle: purchase orders, expense reports, invoices or a department credit card
• Software by name, including Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and any booking or purchasing system
• Trackers, templates or filing systems you set up that other people still use
• Typing speed and languages, if the posting mentions them
• Certifications such as the Certified Administrative Professional (CAP) or a Microsoft Office Specialist exam

Administrative Assistant Resume Sample

Tips for Your Administrative Assistant Resume

• Replace "Responsible for filing and organization" with something you built, such as "Set up a shared tracker in Excel that replaced four email threads for project requests." Managers remember things you made.
• Proving your value in an office job is often less simple than proving it in sales because nobody keeps a scoreboard for meetings booked. Proving it involves counting a normal month's calendars, orders and events and putting a rough number on work that is sometimes invisible even to your boss.
• The level of the people you support is what tells a reader how much you juggle. Name it in every job. Write "three directors" or "a 40-person sales team," for example.
• An executive assistant job is distinguished from an administrative assistant job in that you usually work for one senior leader and sometimes speak on their behalf. Applicants need discretion, judgment, and planning skills, as they are required to deal directly with board members, clients and other executives. Put all three in your summary.
• Address your email to a real person, usually the office manager or the director you'd support. Finding that name is the kind of small research task assistants do every day, and a hiring manager is likely to notice that you went to the trouble.
• If you're bilingual, put it in your headline or summary, since offices that serve Spanish or Vietnamese speakers sometimes pay extra for it.
• In addition to your daily duties, list one or two projects you ran, such as an office move or a switch to new scheduling software. They show you can take on more.