The customer is king.
But as a help desk…
You’re the king of customer service.
Anyone can pick up the phone or respond to an email, but very few can do so efficiently.
Your work extends way beyond solving simple technical problems.
Without you, companies can’t keep up good relationships with their clients. Many businesses would struggle to improve their brand image and keep their loyal customers around.
Moreover:
You help employees from inner departments solve tech issues in a timely fashion. That’s how you allow everyone to be more productive and stay focused on crucial tasks.
Thankfully…
The days of simple FAQ pages and Q&A sections on forums are over.
Companies have understood the full extent of your importance. That explains why headhunters today work hard to recruit the best help desk professionals.
But to land the job you want:
You need an outstanding help desk resume that promotes your worth. And that’s what we’re going to teach you today.
We created this guide to help you make a brilliant resume that stands out and gets results.
We’ll show you how to feature the right skills, experience, and other essential sections to make you shine.
Ready?
Let’s get started.
In this guide, you’ll learn
- Why reading the job description is crucial to picking and featuring the right experience and skills on your resume
- How to structure and format your resume to inspire recruiters and keep them reading
- Best way to showcase your relevant experience and convince headhunters of your worth
- Top technical and soft skills to help you master your job duties and excel at customer service
- Most important additional sections to include if you want to outshine your competition
Looking for related resumes?
How to create a help desk resume that gets you hired
A help desk resume is your chance to leave a strong first impression on recruiters and make them want you.
It's not just a bunch of details or meaningless words sitting on a page. In reality, it's the portal through which you'll land the job you want at the company of your dreams.
Every detail matters, from the way you structure your resume to the way you write your sentences.
Therefore, you must remain strategic in your approach.
First of all:
You need to pick a proper layout for your resume.
There are lots of options to choose from, but not all of them will fit your background.
Here are your two options:
If you have a rich work history and lots of details to share, a reverse-chronological layout is best. Combine that with a double-column temlplate and you can fit everything within a single page without sacrificing any details.
A single column resume template works great for you if you're just getting started as a help desk. You don't want to leave lots of white space in your resume, so you can structure the information to fill the whole page. You might prefer the funcional resume layout in such case, as it allows you to focus on skills, rather than experience.
Next:
You need to be different from everyone else.
Think about it for a second…
The company needs assistance from a professional help desk. They've been looking for an ideal candidate for a while — yet they still haven't hired anyone.
Why do you think is that?
Two reasons:
- The majority of applicants don't have the right set of experience and skills to compete for the job
- No one has addressed the hiring company's needs precisely, and most candidates are ego-centric only looking for their own interest
That's where you'll beg to differ and prove yourself deserving of the position.
You'll highlight your unique expertise, most excellent qualities, and career achievements to stand out from the pack. But more importantly, you'll tailor your resume to answer to the company's needs precisely.
This way, you're outperforming everyone in the race and give recruiters a million reasons to hire you.
Best sections for a help desk resume
- Header
- Experience
- Skills
- Education
- Certifications
- Languages
What recruiters want to see in a help desk resume
- The right customer service experience to help you assist clients effectively
- A solid background in IT and computer science to prove your fitness for the job
- Quantifiable achievements and work results demonstrated through reliable metrics and precise numbers
- Eagerness to learn various technical skills quickly and apply the knowledge in practice
- A set of soft skills including solution-oriented mindset, patience, and interpersonal abilities to allow for flawless communication
The right way to write a header for a help desk resume
The header is a small section sitting at the top of your resume to help you identify yourself.
It only includes personal details - so it shouldn't affect your chances of getting hired.
Right?
Wrong…
You want recruiters to remember who you are in a pile of hundreds of resumes. So, this is your chance to hammer your name into their heads.
You must follow the right structure in making your header. You have to feature your key personal details. And you also need to leave away any unnecessary information.
So, where do you begin?
It's simple.
For starters, you only need to include the following information:
- Full name
- Job title
- Email address
- Location
Next, you'll work on placing them correctly on the page.
Make your name memorable by using a bigger font and separating it from the rest of the details.
The job title comes underneath your full name but in a smaller font.
Featuring your full address is optional, especially if you live far away from the hiring company's location.
So, adding just the city and state in your address is okay.
Also:
LinkedIn is where most headhunters go to publish job postings and find qualified candidates. And the platform presents an opportunity for applicants to showcase their worth beyond a one-page resume.
Therefore…
Featuring a link to your LinkedIn profile is your way of helping recruiters notice you. It allows them to learn more about you before the interview, which is something they're grateful for.
Let's look at a couple of examples:
How to make an outstanding experience section for your help desk resume
Recruiters must be sure that you're their best candidate they can hire before choosing you.
They want to see that you have solid experience with customer experience. And they need to be sure of your IT skills and problem-solving abilities.
But how do you prove any of that?
Well… it's quite simple!
Show that you've done it all before.
Craft an experience section that presents your job experience professionally. Then, fill it with details about your career successes and accomplishments.
Here are three golden rules to follow when writing your experience section:
1- List your experience in chronological order.
A perfect experience section must be chronological. That means you should start from the most recent position and continue further down.
You don't need to include every single position you've ever had. So, be careful when choosing what you put in this section.
2- Be specific.
It's more important to show than just tell when talking about your work history.
Headhunters are tired of reading repetitive job tasks over and over again. Every applicant they come across sounds the same with all the generic duties they find on Google.
The key here is to give recruiters what they want to see specifically. And to find that, you must look through the job description.
Make each bullet point you list here counts by mentioning the impact you had in your previous positions.
But more importantly:
Everything you mention here has to be relevant to the job you're applying for.
3- Quantify your achievements.
This rule gives hiring managers a rational anchor point for comparison. If your numbers are better than everyone else's, you'll separate yourself from the pack.
You won't be stuck at the bottom with the unqualified candidates who also claim to be good at customer support.
So…
Each bullet point must come with a concrete example or a quantifiable achievement to inspire headhunters.
Use precise numbers of the results you achieved in the past to quantify your career wins.
Check out this example:
- •Responsible for customer service and inquiries
- •Helped customers with technical issues related to the company’s products and services
- •Stayed up-to-date with the latest company technologies and software updates
Nobody likes buzzwords, especially not hiring managers.
They've read hundreds of resumes where job responsibilities are listed with no concrete numbers to prove them.
There's nothing to back up those claims and achievements. As a result, such resumes get largely ignored or even count against the applicant.
The solution is to focus on concrete numbers to demonstrate your impact as a help desk professional.
Also:
You need to keep an active language when showcasing your work as a help desk. Stick to action verbs and industry-specific verbs to highlight relevance and competence.
Now, here's what a great help desk experience section looks like:
- •Answered, evaluated, and prioritized 3200 customer inquiries and support requests while maintaining 98% ratings of positive feedback
- •Assisted in the hiring and scaling of the team from 10 teammates to 35 by screening potential candidates
- •Recorded, tracked, and updated support interactions using the company’s ticketing system to help with software development
18 essential skills to highlight in your help desk resume
Featuring the right skills in your resume is key to getting you hired.
Recruiters often find themselves stuck choosing between candidates with the same level of experience. So they rely on the skills section to decide on the best applicant for the job.
But here’s the thing:
It isn’t always clear to you as a job-seeker which talents are essential to showcase in your resume.
Companies differ in the way they operate and deal with their customers. The technologies and tools they use also vary significantly from one industry to another.
As a rule of thumb, you must focus this section on two types of skills:
- Soft skills
- Technical skills
Soft skills include customer service, the ability to stay on top of client requests, troubleshooting, problem-solving, etc…
Patience and solution-oriented thinking are also crucial to helping you excel at your job.
Moreover, you must demonstrate a willingness to learn and adapt to new tools whenever needed. That shows hiring managers your eagerness to succeed at the job and go the extra mile.
On the other hand:
Technical skills vary widely based on the technology used by the company. There are no universally sought-after technical skills in the job market today.
However…
You can recognize what the company needs from you in the job offer. And many tools and technologies are so popular that most businesses in the market today are using them.
So, by this point…
Your primary focus should be to find the most relevant abilities required for the job. Once you identify them, you’ll only need to narrow your list down and present it in this section.
To do that, you should:
- List all the soft and hard skills you possess in one list.
- Define the most sought-after soft/technical talents by reading the job description and keep them in a separate list
- See which skills correlate the most (those are the ones your help desk resume needs to feature)
Here’s our hand-picked list of the most critical help desk resume skills:
Most sought-after technical skills for help desk resume
- Active directory
- Desktop support
- Technical support
- Service desk
- Microsoft Office Suite
- Google Suite
- Troubleshooting
- Email support
Best soft skills to showcase in your help desk resume
- Customer service
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Problem-solving
- Time management
- Multitasking
- Patience
- Attention to detail
- Empathy
- Solution-oriented
Key Takeaways
- Read the job description thoroughly to identify the hiring company’s needs and address them in your resume
- Create an eye-grabbing header to keep headhunters reading
- Feature your relevant work experience and solidify your claims through precise metrics and quantifiable achievements
- Showcase your technical/soft skills in your experience and skills section to make your resume more appealing
- Feature your educational background and certificates to stand out from the crowd and outshine your competitors
Help Desk resume examples
Explore additional help desk resume samples and guides and see what works for your level of experience or role.
By Role
Desktop Support
Desktop support roles are similar to a foundational pillar in IT infrastructure. Therefore, desktop support trends can impact the way whole organizations function.
Emphasize your ability to troubleshoot swiftly and accurately. Display your familiarity with common operating systems and applications. Demonstrate your soft skills relevant to desktop support such as communication, team work and patience. Prove that you understand user issues and solve accordingly. Frame your resume in such a way that it showcases your skills in hardware and software, as well as how those skills led to efficient troubleshooting.
Don't just list qualifications; show how you used them to improve the system. Following 'skill-action-results' could look like 'improved ticket resolution time by...' or 'reduced system crashes by...' and so on.
Help Desk Manager
Help Desk Managers play a critical role in customer service. Their actions can have great influence on customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Experience in software such as ticket tracking systems and database software is a must. Showcase your customer service skills and ability to manage teams. Demonstrate how you have implemented support strategies that reduced resolution time and improved satisfaction.
Avoid simply listing skills. Instead, show how your management style and technical abilities resulted in improved key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, 'Reduced average call handling time by implementing...', 'Increased customer satisfaction by...' et cetera.
Service Desk Manager
A Service Desk Manager role is as a bridge between users and IT operations. This influential role can shape IT processes within a company.
Your resume should demonstrate your expertise in IT service management principles like ITIL or COBIT. Highlight how you have developed and implemented operational procedures that improved efficiency.
Don’t just list your skills. Instead, show how they have led to more efficient operations. Following 'skill-action-results' could look like 'lowered downtimes by implementing...', 'improved service delivery through...' and so on.
```Technical Support Manager
Technical Support Manager roles form a cornerstone of customer and client support systems. Trends within this sphere have far-reaching implications for any tech company.
Among others, highlight your ability to manage and train a team of tech support representatives. Tout your familiarity with a range of software and hardware specific to your industry. Demonstrate a history of increasing customer satisfaction rating by streamlining the tech support process.
Show, not just tell, your skills. e.g. 'lowered tech support turnaround times...', 'improved customer satisfaction ratings by...' and more.