The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Perfect Cabin Crew Resume

Writing a cabin crew resume or CV isn’t wildly different from writing one for any other job. But it comes with its own quirks, and getting it right matters more than most candidates realize. And that’s because most resumes never make it in front of a human being at all.

Nearly every major recruitment drive now runs applications through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before a recruiter ever sees them. The ATS scans, sorts, and shortlists candidates based on how closely a resume matches the skills and qualities that the airline has told it to look for. Airlines receive thousands of applications for every recruitment drive (some of the biggest airlines receive tens of thousands of applications), so this isn’t a formality. It’s the first real filter you have to get through.

If you get past the AI screening system, the next harsh reality to deal with is that the human recruiter will still only spend a matter of seconds on their first pass of your resume. So precision matters at every stage, not just the first one.

This guide walks through seven steps that consistently produce a resume that survives the ATS and lands well with a human recruiter. It’s the process we’ve refined over years of watching what actually gets candidates shortlisted.

Step One: What Should Go in Your Resume?

The first step in creating your perfect cabin crew resume is learning exactly what has to be included. Believe me when I say this, over the many years I’ve been doing this, I’ve learned that less is more in this process.

Human recruiters and the AI software that carries out the initial ‘paper sift’ are looking for and only interested in very specific sections of your resume. These are:

• Your name, address, and contact details
• A short personal summary
• Key skills
• Education and any relevant courses you have completed
• Work or professional experience
• Personal interests and voluntary work

No more is required than this. Ideally, your resume should be just a single page in length, although some candidates with significant work experience may end up slightly extending their resume. In any case, it will soon become obvious that every single word on your resume has to count.

While I’ve said that less is more, this doesn’t make the process of writing your CV any quicker. With every word needing to count, the art of editing is an essential skill.

Let’s look at these sections in a little more detail:

Name, address, and contact details

Include your full name, postal address, email address and telephone number, including the country code. Make sure you use an email address that looks professional. There is no need to include a photo unless you live in a country, such as Germany, where this is standard practice.

💡 Did you know: Adding a photo to your CV or resume for applications to airlines in the United States and the UK could actively harm your application, as recruiters are not allowed to assess what you write against what you look like. Photos won’t necessarily harm an application to a Gulf airline at an Open Day, but it’s not required for online applications, as you will submit your photo separately.

Personal summary

A two to three-sentence paragraph that effectively summarises your professional experience and key skills. This can be presented as a single paragraph or as bullet points.

Key skills

This is perhaps the one area in your resume where you partially get away with ‘stuffing’ keywords without necesarily justify them with evidence. In any case, pick key skills that are relevant to the airline you are applying to.

Education and relevant courses

This is the ideal place to include any relevant courses, including customer service, sales, or safety, that are relevant to a career as cabin crew. Recruiters need to know you are educated to the minimum level that the airline has set, so ensure this section is completed accurately.

Work or professional experience

The most important part of your resume. This is the area where you prove that you possess the skills that the airline is looking for in new cabin crew. To do so, you will explain your key achievements and accomplishments in your role. This is not the place to just list your day-to-day job responsibilities.

Personal interests and voluntary work

This is a fairly outdated section for many careers, but in the world of cabin crew recruitment, writing about your personal interests still holds weight. Why? Because this is the section where you can demonstrate that you lead a healthy and active lifestyle, giving recruiters the confidence that you can survive the demanding work-life balance of being cabin crew.

For candidates with less work experience, this is also the ideal place to add key skills from voluntary work that you might not otherwise be able to prove.

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Step Two: Collate Your Details

Start by collecting all the boring information that will be needed for your resume. It’s tempting to guess or round off the date you finished a job or graduated — don’t. You need exact details: addresses, names, phone numbers, and dates.

Exactly what you include will depend on your personal circumstances. If you’ve had more than ten years of work experience, for example, your high school grades aren’t going to matter. That said, most online application forms will ask for this information anyway, so it’s worth having it all to hand before you start.

Education:

• Names of all places of education: high school, college, university, etc.
• Finish dates (month and year)
• Names and scores for all educational certificates

Employment and voluntary work:

• Name of employer
• Title of role
• Month and year of start and end of employment

💡 Did you know: Even a small mistake can turn into a big problem when airlines bring in outside referencing agencies to confirm that what you’ve told them is true. Mistakes could hold up your application or, potentially, even mean your conditional joining offer is rescinded.

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Step Three: Format Your Resume

Now it’s time to get these details onto the page. You want a resume that looks professional and presents everything in an easy-to-read format.

There are plenty of resume templates online or bundled with word processing software, but most of them aren’t built with Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software in mind. We’ve created six free templates that are both genuinely well-designed and 100% ATS-proof, covering a range of personal circumstances: You can get them here.

If you’d rather build your own from scratch, there are a few rules worth following closely: Read How to Format Your Resume to Be ATS Proof for the full breakdown.

Don’t be tempted by colourful or over-designed layouts. Cabin crew recruitment is a conservative business — save “big, bold and bright” for creative industries. And leave off your photo, date of birth, nationality, and references.

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Step Four: Learn the Qualities Airlines Are Looking For

What specific skills, qualities, and competencies is this airline actually looking for? Time to research properly. Read the “About” pages on the airline’s website, check their social media, and look for interviews or videos that give you a sense of their culture and priorities.

Then study the job advert itself, line by line. What qualities are they naming? What do they consider makes an excellent crew member? Treat every one of these as a keyword you need to genuinely demonstrate and not just mention in passing in your resume.

If you write a line that doesn’t actively prove you possess one of these qualities, ask yourself what it’s doing in your resume. Simply claiming a skill isn’t enough. You need to show it. Take these two sentences which say the same thing but in very different ways.

❌ “I work well in a team”

versus

✅ “Listened to ideas from colleagues, contributed suggestions, and worked with the team to agree a plan”

If you need to get a general idea of the skills and qualities that nearly every airline is looking for, then this article is essential reading: The Best Qualities to Highlight in Your Cabin Crew Application Resume.

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Step Five: Choose the Right Style

This is a part of resume writing that trips a lot of people up. A few rules will get you a resume that a hiring manager will actually enjoy reading:

Write everything in the past tense, and eliminate pronouns. That means eliminating the use of “I” or “my.” For example:

✅ “Served customers and resolved problems quickly and efficiently. Managed the shop and staff in the manager’s absence.”

Pay particular attention to two sections:

• Personal Summary: one to two short paragraphs, highlighting your best achievements and personal qualities. Sharp, direct sentences.
• Work Experience: four to five bullet points per role, each one built around an achievement rather than a duty.

For more details on this, see First Person or Third Person? What Style to Write Your Resume In.

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Step Six: Describe Your Achievements, Not Your Duties

Many people write a resume that simply lists their responsibilities. A resume built around achievements instead gives the recruiter a much clearer picture of who you actually are, allowing your personality to shine through the page.

It’s easy to lose track of the small wins in a job you’ve done every day for years. Everything in your resume has to be true, but don’t undersell yourself. This is your first real opportunity to make your case and it has to make an impact

Where you can, use numbers to provide objective evidence of your achievements. If you helped 200 customers a shift, or your service contributed to €1,000 in sales, say so directly.

This takes practice to get right. For worked examples, see How to Write a Winning Resume: Describe Achievements, Don’t Bore With Responsibilities.

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Step Seven: Check, and Check Again

By this point, you should have a resume that genuinely reflects your best achievements, ties clearly back to what the airline is looking for, and sounds like you.

But there’s always room for a mistake to creep in, like a stray typo, a weak phrase, a section that’s lost focus. Read it. Then read it again, ideally after a night away from it.

There are free tools worth running your draft through as a final check. See our full list of recommended resume writing resources for the current picks.

Don’t rush this last step. A good resume can take a couple of days or several weeks to get right, and it’s worth treating it as a living document, something you come back to and sharpen as you learn more about what recruiters are looking for.

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