Stop Losing Event Coordinator Jobs to Bad Resumes
Identify and correct the critical mistakes that keep hiring managers from seeing your event planning expertise.
Common Mistakes That Kill Your Chances
Each mistake includes why it hurts, how to fix it, and before/after examples
- Provides no value to recruiters
- Lacks keywords that ATS scans for
- Fails to showcase your unique event planning strengths
- Replace the objective with a 2‑sentence professional summary
- Highlight years of experience and key event types you manage
- Insert high‑impact keywords such as "venue sourcing" and "budget oversight"
Objective: Seeking a challenging position where I can utilize my skills.
Professional Summary: Dynamic Event Coordinator with 5+ years orchestrating corporate conferences and large‑scale festivals for audiences up to 20,000. Expert in vendor negotiation, budget management, and on‑site execution, consistently delivering events 15% under budget.
- Makes you look like a task‑taker rather than a results‑driver
- Hard for ATS to match quantifiable keywords
- Recruiters skim quickly and miss your real value
- Start each bullet with a strong action verb
- Add numbers, percentages, or audience sizes
- Show the outcome or benefit of your actions
- Coordinated logistics for corporate meetings. - Managed vendor relationships. - Handled event registration.
- Coordinated logistics for 30+ corporate meetings, overseeing budgets up to $250K and achieving a 98% on‑time delivery rate. - Negotiated vendor contracts, reducing costs by 12% while maintaining service quality. - Implemented an online registration system that increased attendee sign‑ups by 25% and cut processing time by 40%.
- ATS filters out resumes lacking core industry terms
- Hiring managers may assume you lack required expertise
- Research job postings for common terms (e.g., "venue scouting", "budget reconciliation", "on‑site coordination")
- Weave at least 5–7 of these keywords naturally throughout Experience and Skills sections
- Use exact phrasing when possible
Experience: Managed events and handled budgets.
Experience: Led venue scouting, contract negotiation, and on‑site coordination for multi‑day conferences with budgets exceeding $500K, ensuring seamless execution and client satisfaction.
- Confuses ATS parsers, causing data loss
- Creates a sloppy visual impression for recruiters
- Standardize dates to "MMM YYYY" (e.g., Jan 2022)
- List locations as "City, State" consistently
- Align dates to the right margin for readability
Event Coordinator ABC Events – New York June 2020 – March 2022
Event Coordinator, ABC Events — New York, NY Jun 2020 – Mar 2022
- Hiring managers typically spend <30 seconds per resume
- ATS may truncate content beyond the first two pages
- Focus on the most recent 10 years of experience
- Combine older roles into a single "Earlier Experience" section
- Remove unrelated jobs and generic soft‑skill statements
Full 4‑page resume detailing every part‑time job since college.
Concise 1‑page resume highlighting 5 relevant roles, key achievements, and core event‑planning competencies.
- Contact info includes phone, email, LinkedIn URL
- Professional summary is 2‑3 lines with keywords
- Each experience bullet starts with an action verb and includes a metric
- Key Skills list contains at least 8 event‑specific terms
- Dates are formatted uniformly and aligned right
- File saved as PDF with the naming convention
- Add a strong action verb
- Quantify the result (percentage, dollar amount, attendee count)
- Insert relevant event‑planning software or methodology