Executive résumé example with a free Word template.

Dana Whitfield is a fictional chief operating officer: twenty years from plant manager to the top operations job at a $480M logistics company, with two acquisitions and a warehouse-system rollout along the way. Her résumé is the kind a search partner forwards to a CEO without rewriting it.

Read it for the shape as much as the words. It runs to two pages. The two most recent roles carry almost all of the detail, the plant manager years shrink to one line, and there isn't a graduation year in sight.

We pulled current US postings for COO, CEO, president, senior vice president and vice president roles and counted how many mention each skill. The result is below, ranked, with the sample size. It's our own sample, not an industry survey, and the note under the list says exactly how we counted.

The top of the list is about people and planning: coaching and mentoring (39 of 82 postings), stakeholder management (38 of 82) and budgeting (37 of 82). Finance terms that dominate executive résumés show up far less: P&L ownership in 16 of 82, M&A in 6 of 82, EBITDA in 2 of 82.

That doesn't mean you should drop the numbers. It means the résumé also has to show how you lead: who you developed, which executives and boards you worked with, how you set and ran the plan. Dana's bullets on the operating cadence the board reviews, and on training 300 supervisors, are there for that reason. Use a posting's words only for things you have done, and give each one a bullet that proves it.

The Word file above is Dana's résumé in OneResume's Professional layout: one column, standard headings, real text rather than images, so applicant tracking systems read it in order. To make it yours:

1. Replace the summary first. Your title, your years, the size of what you run, and one or two results. Leave the rest of the page alone until this is right.
2. Keep the section order. Summary, experience, skills, education. Experience is what an executive reader came for.
3. Give your two latest roles four to six bullets each, and earlier roles one or two.
4. Stay at two pages. If you run over, cut the oldest bullets, not the white space.
5. Send a PDF unless the application asks for Word.

In OneResume, the Professional template comes with Pro and the Clean template is free. Compare all five on the ATS-friendly templates page.

• Responsibilities instead of results. "Responsible for six plants" is a job description. "Ran six plants and delivered $18M in savings" is a résumé.
• Hiding the scale. If you never say how big the budget, team or business was, the reader assumes it was small.
• Three or more pages. Length reads as an inability to choose what matters, which is the job you're applying for.
• Every role since your first job. Two decades of full detail buries your best work on page three.
• Outdated tools and certifications. Keep what a reader would value today; drop software nobody has run since the 2000s.
• A photo, date of birth or marital status. None belong on a US résumé, at any level.