Retail Sales Associate 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 Retail Sales Associate position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Retail Sales Associate 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 Retail Sales Associate 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 Retail Sales Associate and those who list the position of Retail Sales Associate on their resumes predominantly feature Customer Service and Cashier as the most common and important terms, respectively. But the list quickly begins to diverge with resumes showing Communication Skills, Cash Handling and MS Office 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 Retail Sales Associate 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 Retail Sales Associate or to advance your career into beyond this role.

The top three keywords employers use in Retail Sales Associate job descriptions are Customer Service appearing in 33.89% of postings, Cashier 10.21%, and Communication Skills appearing in 8.69%. 52.79% of Retail Sales Associate job postings have at least one of these terms indicating the value employers place commonly place on these experiences when hiring candidates. Personal Shopping, Product Knowledge and Collaboration are still quite important, but a smaller sliceof the employer Retail Sales Associate job postings with their combined total of 23.74%. At 23.47%, Fashion, Sales Experience, Innovation, and Cash Handling appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Retail Sales Associate skills and requirements according to employers.

The top three keywords people who held Retail Sales Associate descriptions listed on their resumes are Customer Service (appearing on 27.35%), Cashier (appearing on 15.68%), and Communication Skills (appearing on 9.82%). 52.85% of resumes with Retail Sales Associate 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. Cash Handling, MS Office, and English Speaking are still quite common, and a respectable share of skills found on resumes for Retail Sales Associate with 24.16% of the total. At 22.98%, Detail Oriented, Stocking, Scheduling, and Collaboration appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Retail Sales Associate skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Retail Sales Associate job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Retail Sales Associate 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 Retail Sales Associate roles. 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 Retail Sales Associate 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 often list Retail Experience, Innovation, Loss Prevention, Sales Experience or Fashion as requirements in Retail Sales Associate job descriptions; however, job seekers 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 Retail Sales Associate role may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Retail Sales Associate tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Personal Shopping, Stockroom, Proactive, Retail Management, Compliance, Product Knowledge, Collaboration, Customer Service, Interpersonal Skills, Communication Skills, Scheduling or Stocking in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a job seeker 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 Retail Sales Associate.

Employer job listings seldom list Accuracy, Cashier, Cash Handling, Detail Oriented, Multi Tasking, Technical or Social Media as important skills or qualifications in Retail Sales Associate job descriptions. Nevertheless, job seekers 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 Retail Sales Associate role 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 Retail Sales Associate. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!