Most chef CVs read like a job description that got copied and pasted. A hiring chef scanning fifty applications before a Friday dinner service does not care that you "prepared food to a high standard." They want to know which kitchens you survived, how many covers you pushed on a busy night, and whether you can run a section without babysitting. Your CV has to answer those questions in the first ten seconds.

Structure it like a service, not a story

A kitchen CV works best when it front-loads the information a head chef actually reads first. Keep it to two pages. Anything longer and it goes in the bin.

Open with a short profile, four lines at most, that states your current level, your core cuisine, and one concrete achievement. Skip the adjectives. "Sous chef with eight years across two-rosette and high-volume gastropub kitchens, running a section of six" tells a hiring chef more than "passionate culinary professional dedicated to excellence."

Then, in order:

• Work history, most recent first, with real detail
• Skills, grouped so they can be scanned
• Training and food safety certifications
• Awards, notable covers, and press if you have them

Education goes near the bottom unless you just left culinary school. Nobody hiring a head chef cares which college you attended fifteen years ago.

Show progression through the brigade

Restaurant owners read a CV for movement. They want to see you climbing the brigade, not drifting sideways every eight months. Make the ranks explicit: commis, chef de partie, sous chef, head chef. If you jumped from larder to sauce to running the pass, say so, because that arc is the whole point.

For each role, name the restaurant, its style, and its scale. A line like "Chef de partie, sauce section, 90-cover bistro doing 200 covers on weekends" carries weight. It tells them the volume you can handle and the station you owned.

Watch the gaps. A chef who stayed somewhere three years reads as reliable; six kitchens in two years reads as a problem, fairly or not. If you moved for stages or to chase a specific chef, note it in a single clause so it looks deliberate rather than restless.

Progression is the story a kitchen CV tells. Ranks, stations, and scale in that order beat any list of adjectives.

The skills that actually get you the trial

Every head chef resume lists "team player" and "works well under pressure." Those words are invisible now. What gets you a trial shift is specific, verifiable competence.

Group your skills so a busy reader can scan them:

• Cuisines and technique: French classical, modern British, Italian fresh pasta, live-fire cooking, whatever you genuinely own. Do not pad this with things you did once.
• Stations: larder, sauce, fish, grill, pastry, pass. Say which ones you can run solo.
• Food safety and HACCP: your Level 2 or Level 3 certificate, allergen management, temperature control, and any Environmental Health scores you helped earn. A clean audit history is a genuine selling point.
• Kitchen management: rota building, ordering, stock rotation, supplier relationships, training junior staff.
• Cost control: GP percentage, menu costing, portion control, waste reduction. If you brought food cost from 34 to 28 percent, that number belongs on the page.

That last group separates a cook from a chef who can be trusted with a kitchen. Owners think about margins constantly. A candidate who talks in gross profit and food cost is speaking their language.

Tailor for the kitchen you are applying to

A fine dining CV and a volume kitchen CV should not look the same, even for the same person. Read the job, then decide which version of yourself to lead with.

For fine dining, emphasise precision, consistency, and pedigree. Name the rosettes, stars, or awards attached to the places you worked. Mention the tasting menus, the plating, the mise en place discipline, the chefs you trained under. This world runs on reputation and lineage, and a name like a known head chef on your CV opens doors.

For high-volume or brigade-heavy kitchens, hotels, banqueting, gastropubs, lead with throughput and control. Covers per service, speed, consistency at scale, and your ability to hold quality when three hundred plates leave the pass in two hours. Show you can build a rota, control a section, and keep GP tight when the room is full.

If you are moving between the two, address it directly in your profile line so nobody assumes you cannot handle the switch. A fine dining chef applying to a busy brasserie should signal that they want volume and can cook fast, or the CV gets read as overqualified and dropped.

What hiring chefs are really checking for

Behind every line, the person reading is asking three quiet questions. Can this chef actually cook at the level we need? Will they turn up and stay? Will they make the kitchen calmer or worse?

You answer the first with named stations, cuisines, and scale. You answer the second with tenure and a clean, honest work history. The third one is harder, but a CV that mentions training juniors, running a section without drama, and holding standards through a bad service quietly signals that you are someone a team wants next to them at eight on a Saturday.

One practical note. If your kitchen experience is scattered across old LinkedIn roles and half-finished documents, a tool like Postulit can pull your LinkedIn profile into a clean, structured CV so you are editing a solid draft instead of starting from a blank page.

Now do the concrete work. Rewrite your profile line to name your level, cuisine, and one number. Go through each role and add the covers and the station you owned. Move your GP or food cost figure somewhere a scanning eye will hit it. Then cut every adjective that could describe any chef alive. What is left is a CV that reads like someone who can walk into a kitchen and work.