Shop Assistant CV Examples & Writing Guide

This CV is for an experienced shop assistant who is now a keyholder at a homeware store. UK adverts call this job "sales assistant", "retail assistant" or "shop assistant"; in the US it is a "sales associate". The name is made up. Look at how every job has a store type, a store size and at least one number a manager can check.

A store manager hiring a shop assistant is usually reading CVs between customers. They give each one about twenty seconds. Four things decide whether yours gets a call.

• Store type and pace. Supermarket, out-of-town retail park, specialist fashion, electronics and luxury are different jobs. "Sales assistant at a 12,000 sq ft homeware store doing £2.6m a year" tells the manager what pace you are used to.
• Till and cash. Which EPOS you used, how many transactions a shift, and whether your till balanced. A line like "zero discrepancies over £5 in 3 years" is worth more than any adjective.
• Selling and service numbers. Units per transaction, average sale, add-on rate, loyalty sign-ups, credit applications, mystery shop scores, online reviews that named you. Any of these proves you do more than stand at the till.
• Availability and staying power. How long you stayed, whether you can work evenings, weekends and bank holidays, and whether you were trusted with keys or opening and closing.

“The first thing I look for is whether they have closed a store and counted a till. The second is any number about selling. If both are there, I stop reading and call them, because most retail CVs have neither.”

Use a personal statement once you have worked in any shop. Use a career objective for your first retail job, and make it about what you can do (till, stock, customer service, availability) rather than what you want. Keep either to three lines.

Most retail CVs list duties from the job advert: "assisted customers, operated till, stocked shelves". Every applicant can say that. Add the shop, the volume and the result, and the same duty becomes evidence.

List 10 to 14 skills, concrete enough that a manager could test them on a trial shift. Split them into till and money, selling and service, stock and shop floor, and the personal qualities that matter in a shop.

• Till and money: the EPOS systems you know (Square, Lightspeed, Shopify POS, NCR, Toshiba, Oracle Xstore), cash handling and banking, returns and exchanges, gift cards, interest-free credit applications, and National Lottery, PayPoint and Challenge 25 for supermarkets and convenience stores.
• Selling and service: greeting and needs questions, suggestive and add-on selling, loyalty and store card sign-ups, product knowledge for your category, handling complaints, phone and click-and-collect orders.
• Stock and shop floor: taking deliveries, stockroom organisation, stock counts and scanning with handheld devices, planogram changes, visual merchandising, price changes and ticketing, loss prevention awareness.
• Personal qualities that count here: reliability (say it with attendance), staying polite through a rush, working a closing shift alone, learning a new product range fast, and being flexible on the rota.
• Extras worth a line: a second language, Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate (supermarkets and cafes), pallet truck or forklift (large stores and garden centres), keyholder or supervisor experience.

Leave out "communication skills" and "team player" as bare words. Put them in a bullet point instead: "trained 4 new starters on the till" says both.

Retail is one of the most common first jobs in the UK, and store managers hire people with no experience every week. They are looking for three things: you will turn up for your shifts, you can be polite to strangers for eight hours, and you can learn a till. Your CV should prove those three things with whatever you have.

1. 1Write a two-line career objective with your availability first. "Available weekday afternoons, all day Saturday and Sunday, and bank holidays" is the line the manager needs. Large shops in England and Wales can open for only six hours on a Sunday, so Sunday shifts are shorter; say if you can do them.
2. 2Add a Skills section: any till or payment app you have used (school shop, fundraiser, a card reader at a market), basic maths and counting change, phone manners, a second language, lifting and standing for a shift.
3. 3Turn school, volunteer and family experience into retail bullet points: babysitting (reliability, 3 years with the same family), school fundraisers (sold £1,500 of raffle tickets), charity shop volunteering (counter, cash box), sport (training five days a week).
4. 4Add a line for any certificate you can earn in a day or two: Level 2 Food Hygiene for supermarkets or cafes, a free online customer service course.
5. 5Keep it to one page, no photo and no date of birth, and hand your CV in personally if the shop accepts walk-ins. Managers still remember faces.

Large chains route applications through a tracking system (Workday, Oracle Taleo, SuccessFactors and Paradox are common in retail) before the store manager sees them. Small independent shops read paper. Write for both.

• Length: one page, always. Two pages suggest you have not worked in a shop.
• Order: header, personal statement or career objective with availability, experience, skills, education. Put availability high.
• One column, standard font, dates on the right, no photo, no date of birth. UK adverts use "sales assistant", "retail assistant", "shop assistant" and "customer assistant" (supermarkets) for much the same job; use the advert's wording.
• Keywords to mirror from the advert: "EPOS" or "till", "cash handling", "customer service", "merchandising", "replenishment", "loss prevention", "loyalty scheme", "product knowledge", the store category ("fashion", "grocery", "electronics"), and the availability words ("weekends", "bank holidays", "flexible hours").
• Use the same job title as the advert in your header, and write your old title in the experience entry. If you were a "sales associate" abroad, write "Sales Assistant (Sales Associate)".
• Save as PDF unless the portal asks for Word: Kayla-Brennan-Sales-Assistant-CV.pdf.

Run the file through the cvplex ATS checker with the advert pasted in. It shows which of the advert's words you left out and whether your header was read cleanly.