Executive Director 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 an Executive Director position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as an Executive Director 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 an Executive Director and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

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 Executive Director 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 an Executive Director or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Executive Director positions. The top three keywords make up 41.2% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how Collaboration, Compliance, and Communication Skills shares stack up against the share from resumes. Fundraising, Strategic Planning and Management Skills represent an additionally healthy share of the employer Executive Director job postings with their combined total of 29.07%. At 29.72%, Assisted Living, Innovation, Grant Writing, and Donations appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Executive Director skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Executive Director positions. The top three keywords represent 38.06% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Collaboration, Strategic Planning, and Compliance match up to employer job descriptions. Customer Service, Fundraising, and Facilitation represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Executive Director with 30.14% of the total. At 31.81%, Grant Writing, Project Management, Budget Management, and Non Profit appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Executive Director skills and qualifications found on resumes.

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

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the position of Executive Director tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Supervisory Experience, Management Skills, Communication Skills, Assisted Living, Finance Management or Auto Delivery 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 an Executive Director.

Employer job listings infrequently list Donations, Compliance, Relationship Management, Innovation, Collaboration, Fundraising, Customer Retention, Non Profit, Committee Management, Human Resources Experience, Grant Writing, Strategic Planning, Budget Management, MS Office or Facilitation as important skills or qualifications in Executive Director 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 an Executive Director 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 an Executive Director. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!