Acquiring the right supplies and managing expenses is crucial in business. That’s where you shine by creating effective purchasing strategies, negotiating prices, and managing vendor relationships.
Have you chosen a suitable resume template and strategically planned your resume to help you acquire your next job?
While you know how to analyze market trends and charts of data with ease, displaying your top job skills on a short resume can feel like a much more challenging task. We’re here to help with these purchasing manager resume examples and a cover letter maker that helped many procurement professionals land jobs in 2024.
Why this resume works
- Any managerial role requires effort and a wide range of skills. Your purchasing manager resume should be no different.
- Don’t feel shy to list all related skills you may have, even if they’re a lot. Show your employers that you have what it takes to reduce supplier mishaps and logistics costs by quantifying past related experiences.
Why this resume works
- Buy more at the least possible price. This is a summary of what’s expected from your end for this role. Got any past relevant experience? List them down.
- Don’t feel too overconfident, however. Follow Ava’s footsteps to mention and highlight important metrics that have saved money and time in the past in your purchasing agent resume. For your non-relevant experiences, try adding work that directly or indirectly profited a company, even if it’s something as simple as negotiating contracts.
Why this resume works
- A good purchasing assistant resume should include your contribution to help a company make better and more informed buying decisions.
- Here’s where you’ll want to display your skills in multiple software like Procore and TradeGecko. Don’t sleep on any clerk-related experience, too. As long as you mention tasks that reduce annual procurement costs or avoid service disruption, you’ll be good to go!
Related resume examples
Customize Your Purchasing Manager Resume to the Job Description
Every company’s purchasing strategy will present unique needs. For example, you always need to account for industry trends and the specific materials necessary to produce products when planning your approach. The same is true when optimizing your resume.
You’ll want to use your analytical skills to review the job description and identify what acquisition skills each company is seeking. Do they need help with compliance? Then, your ability to create effective procurement policies may be essential to list.
Need some ideas?
15 best purchasing manager skills
- Logistics Management
- Forecasting
- IBM Maximo
- Vendor relations
- Negotiation
- SAP
- Budget Management
- QuickBooks
- Global Sourcing
- NetSuite
- Lean Manufacturing
- Ariba
- QlikView
- Oracle PeopleSoft
- Microsoft Project
Your purchasing manager work experience bullet points
Every purchasing specialist knows that data is key in decision-making. Hiring managers also look for metrics to determine if you’ll be the best candidate for their needs.
In your work experience references, you’ll want to use your knowledge of core business metrics to your advantage to show how you’re successful. For example, you could explain how you reduced material costs while maintaining quality assurance standards.
Here are some excellent metrics for purchasing managers to use on resumes.
- Supply chain disruptions: Every purchasing manager needs to keep quality and accessibility in mind during procurement, so limiting supply chain disruptions is crucial.
- Budgetary adherence: Companies always have a budget they want to hit to ensure a good ROI, so being able to manage spending accordingly will make your skills stand out.
- Carbon footprint: Companies must be concerned with emissions and ecologically friendly operations during material acquisition and usage to comply with industry standards.
- Data accuracy: While forecasting and budgeting for expenses, the accuracy of the data you gather will be vital to success.
See what we mean?
- Assisted in developing a sustainability-focused procurement strategy, increasing environmentally friendly purchases for food containers by 37%.
- Led training initiatives to teach multiple departments about effectively using SharePoint and Procore, enhancing overall team productivity by 49%.
- Integrated cloud solutions procurement through Coupa, streamlining purchase operations and reducing server costs by 9%.
- Lowered supply chain disruption-related incidents by 43% using insights from Jaggaer Supplier Management.
9 active verbs to start your purchasing manager work experience bullet points
- Lowered
- Updated
- Managed
- Created
- Distributed
- Acquired
- Generated
- Reduced
- Planned
3 Tips for a Successful Purchasing Manager Resume if You Lack Experience
- Get creative with how you showcase leadership
- When you haven’t worked as a manager before, it can feel confusing how you’ll showcase leadership skills. However, there are still ways for inexperienced purchasing manager applicants to do so. For example, you could explain how you educated teams on efficient material usage to reduce expenses by 34%.
- Show high amounts of technical ability
- While you may not have much management experience, you can still showcase high levels of technical skills from previous procurement or logistics roles. For example, how you use IBM Maximo to create maintenance procedures that help extend asset lifecycles by 49%.
- Present how education has equipped you for the role
- Your degree in supply chain management or related fields will have also equipped you with many abilities you need for the role. So, even if you don’t have much work experience, you could still explain how you used QuickBooks for 78% more accurate expense planning in a class project.
3 Tips to Create an Outstanding Purchasing Manager Resume if You Have Experience
- Keep it on a single page
- While you may have a lot of procurement experience, you’ll still want to limit yourself to a one-page resume for easy review. To narrow it down, focus on the primary needs of each job. For example, a company looking for help with global sourcing will like seeing applicants who emphasize their experience in international forecasting and stakeholder relations.
- Consider using a resume summary
- When you have a ton of experience, showcasing some highly relevant skills and achievements in a resume summary can help you stand out. For example, you could write a few sentences about using Oracle PeopleSoft to manage spending and performance data for 50 global company locations to ensure a 97% success rate in budgetary adherence.
- Eliminate irrelevant jobs
- If you’ve worked at more than four jobs, you don’t have to list them all on your resume since that would be too much for hiring managers to review. That means you can eliminate ones like supply chain management internships or data entry clerk roles that won’t be relevant anymore.
Reverse chronological formatting will work best for purchasing managers. It’ll help emphasize your most recent and relevant forecasting and negotiation experiences while allowing hiring managers to easily look back and see how you’ve grown throughout your career.
Your cover letter can fill in any details that were left out on your resume. For example, you could write about how you connect with the company’s mission and want to use your proficiency in lean manufacturing to help their dynamic team achieve more efficient operations.
Speaking in an active voice using action words like “purchased” or “analyzed” will help you present engaging and results-driven examples that will stand out to hiring managers. For example, saying you “analyzed 1,083 spending records to identify 55 opportunities to reduce costs” sounds far more engaging than simply saying you’re “proficient in spending analysis.”
