Collections Agent Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for a Collections Agent position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Collections Agent may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of a Collections Agent and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that both employers hiring for a Collections Agent and those who list the position of Collections Agent on their resumes predominantly feature Collection Management and Customer Service as the most common and important terms, respectively. But the list quickly begins to diverge with resumes showing MS Office, Communication Skills and Scheduling at positions three, four and five, while job listings show a different pattern. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to Collections Agent jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be a Collections Agent or to advance your career into beyond this role.

The top three keywords employers use in Collections Agent job descriptions are Collection Management appearing in 23.08% of postings, Customer Service 20.55%, and Communication Skills appearing in 14.86%. 58.49% of Collections Agent job postings have at least one of these terms indicating the value employers place commonly place on these experiences when hiring candidates. Detail Oriented, Outbound Calling and Problem Solving Skills are still quite important, but a smaller sliceof the employer Collections Agent job postings with their combined total of 20.02%. At 21.51%, Negotiation Skills, Collection Services, MS Office, and Bilingual appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Collections Agent skills and requirements according to employers.

The top three keywords people who held Collections Agent descriptions listed on their resumes are Customer Service (appearing on 24.89%), Collection Management (appearing on 20.05%), and MS Office (appearing on 8.64%). 53.58% of resumes with Collections Agent descriptions have at least one of these terms. The Resume Checklist will help you make sense of whether or not employers are also demanding these skills. Communication Skills, Scheduling, and Cashier are still quite common, and a respectable share of skills found on resumes for Collections Agent with 22.27% of the total. At 24.14%, Accountable, Data Entry, Multi Tasking, and Outbound Calling appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Collections Agent skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Collections Agent job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Collections Agent on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Collections Agent positions. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within Collections Agent job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Employer job listings frequently list Recruiting, Collection Services, Negotiation Skills, Innovation, Proactive or Bilingual as requirements in Collections Agent job descriptions; however, candidates mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Collections Agent position may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the position of Collections Agent tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Computer Literacy, Communication Skills, Problem Solving Skills, Detail Oriented, Account Receivables, Inbound Calls, Collection Management, Outbound Calling, English Speaking, Customer Service, Compliance, Account Management, MS Office, Accountable or Accuracy in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a candidate you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as a Collections Agent.

Employer job listings rarely list Multi Tasking, Technical or Microsoft Excel as important skills or qualifications in Collections Agent job descriptions. Nevertheless, candidates mention them much more commonly in their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Collections Agent position may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as a Collections Agent. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!