How to Write a CV for a Bartender Role

What a bar manager reads for first

Before they read a word about your cocktail knowledge, most bar managers are checking three things: can you work the shifts they actually need covered, have you worked in a venue like theirs, and are you free to start soon. Hospitality rotas are built around weekends, evenings and bank holidays, and a huge number of applications get set aside simply because the candidate never said whether they can do them. Put your availability near the top, in plain terms: "Available for evenings, weekends and late finishes" tells a manager more in one line than a paragraph about your personality.

The second scan is for venue match. A high-volume sports bar doing three hundred covers on a Saturday needs someone who can pour fast, manage a queue at the bar and keep a float straight under pressure. A cocktail bar wants someone who can build a Negroni to spec, know their classics, and talk a guest through a menu without hesitating. A hotel bar wants someone comfortable with room charges, concierge referrals and a slower, more formal pace. These are different jobs wearing the same job title. If your CV doesn't say which kind of bar you've worked in — not just the name, but the type and the pace — the manager has to guess, and a guess usually goes against you.

Licences and qualifications that actually mean something here

Most bartending qualifications are informal or on-the-job, which is exactly why the ones that are formal carry weight. List them clearly, not buried in a skills paragraph:

• Personal Licence (England and Wales) or equivalent — if you hold one, say so and name the licensing authority that issued it. This is the single credential that signals you can be left in sole charge of a licensed premises and that you understand the legal side of the job: age verification, refusal of service, licensing conditions. Even if the role doesn't require you to be the named premises supervisor, holding this licence puts you ahead of candidates who don't.
• APLH (Award for Personal Licence Holders) — the qualification you sit to get the Personal Licence. Worth naming even if you haven't yet applied for the licence itself, because it shows you've done the training.
• Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene for Catering — expected almost everywhere food or ice is handled, which is most bars. If you don't have it, it's cheap and quick to get, and its absence is noticeable on a CV that otherwise looks experienced.
• First Aid at Work — not universal, but relevant if you've worked events, festivals or late-night venues where it was a stated requirement.
• WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) Level 1 or 2 — genuinely relevant for wine bars, hotel bars and higher-end cocktail venues; largely irrelevant for a sports bar or nightclub, so weight it accordingly.

Don't pad this list with generic customer service certificates. A manager hiring bar staff already assumes you can talk to people; what they're checking for is whether you're legally and practically ready to be trusted with a till, a cellar and last orders.

How experience should actually be evidenced

"Experienced bartender, great with people" tells a hiring manager nothing they can act on. What they're looking for is specific, checkable detail:

• Venue type and scale. Not just "The Anchor, Bristol" but "120-cover gastropub bar" or "nightclub, capacity 800, weekend trading only." This single detail does most of the work of telling a manager what your shifts actually looked like.
• What you were responsible for beyond pouring drinks. Cellar management — changing kegs, line cleaning, cask conditioning — is a distinct skill set that not every bartender has, and venues that need it will scan for the word "cellar" specifically. Stock takes, ordering, and float reconciliation at the end of a shift are worth naming if you did them; they're evidence you can be trusted with money and stock, which is a different trust to being good behind the bar.
• The systems you used. Naming the actual till or EPOS system — Square, Toast, Lightspeed, Zonal, Res Diary for bookings — is a small detail that does real work, because a venue running the same system wants someone who won't need retraining on the basics on day one.
• Drinks knowledge in concrete terms, not adjectives. "Built and ran a 12-cocktail seasonal menu" or "trained new starters on the classics list" says something. "Passionate about mixology" says nothing a manager can use.
• Trade references. In this field, the reference that matters most is usually a bar or general manager, not HR. Name them and their role — "reference available from [Name], General Manager" — because hospitality hiring often runs on a phone call to a previous manager rather than a written reference letter, and making that easy to arrange speeds things up.

Gaps between jobs matter less here than in most fields, since hospitality turnover is high and widely understood. What matters more is whether your history shows you can hold a shift down reliably — so if you left roles for ordinary reasons (moved city, seasonal contract ended, venue closed), say so briefly rather than leaving a silence that reads as something worse.

What bartenders routinely leave off

A few things turn up missing again and again, even on CVs from people with solid experience:

• Whether they hold a Personal Licence or APLH, assuming it's not relevant unless applying for a supervisor role. It's relevant earlier than people think, because it signals reliability and legal awareness even in a standard bartending post.
• Age verification and Challenge 25 experience. If you've worked somewhere with strict ID policies, naming that you enforced Challenge 25 or similar shows you understand licensing risk, which matters more to managers than it might seem from outside the trade.
• DBS checks, where relevant — some late-licensed venues or hotel groups ask for one, and having already been through the process is worth a line.
• Actual volume handled. "Served on a busy Saturday night" is vague. "Worked the well bar serving 200+ covers on peak nights" or "sole bartender for a 60-seat cocktail bar" gives a manager something real to picture.
• Trial shift availability. Many bar and restaurant groups hire off a paid trial shift rather than a second interview. Stating you're available for one, and where, can move things along faster than another round of emails.
• Language skills, if you have them — genuinely useful in hotel bars and tourist-heavy venues, and often left off because candidates don't think of it as bar-relevant.

What to do with this

Go through your last two or three roles and add, for each one, the venue type and scale, the till system, and one concrete thing you were trusted with beyond pouring drinks. Add your Personal Licence or APLH status near the top if you have it, even for a non-supervisory role. State your availability in the first third of the page. Then find a named manager, not HR, to act as a reference for each role and put their name against it.

If you're applying to several venues at once and each one wants a slightly different emphasis — cocktail knowledge for one, volume and speed for another — jobmarket.pro reads each advert and rebuilds your CV around what that specific venue is asking for, from one profile it can't invent experience into.