For Business Support Officer, Executive Assistant, Administration Officer, administration leadership roles and everything in between, we’ve got you covered.
Get our expert tips to stand out from the crowd.
Administrators are professional organisers. You will be vital to your potential employers operation, so you need to convince them that you are up to the task.
Administration roles are highly competitive. To different yourself from the other candidates, we want to back up the claims we make about your skillset with examples of achievements and transferrable skills.
We want to highlight your proficiency with the various systems you are familiar in, your experience in previous roles, and any process improvements you have implemented to make things run more efficiently.
Most roles will also require a cover letter, unless you’re applying for a government role, which will require responses to the selection criteria. You should produce a cover letter to go hand in hand with your resume and provide a brief value statement highlight your key selling points, outline some examples which reinforce your points, and include a call to action statement for your potential employer.
A business support role undertakes a range of administrative support services and manages and maintains administrative systems. This could include undertaking financial, purchasing and vendor management, responding to enquiries, and maintaining databases, offering key administrative back-end support to facilitate business operations.
Employers want to know that you will be the right fit for their team while ensuring that you have the technical capability to undertake the work. A skills snapshot in your resume can help to demonstrate key skills you may have had experience with.
An Executive Assistant provides high level executive support to the leadership team within an organisation while providing executive, secretarial and administrative services across a range of complex issues to support efficient and effective operations of the organisation in general.
The role of an EA is hihgly autonomous, busy, with lots of competing demands, priorities, and deadlines. You must be able to anticipate the needs of your executive and align with their working style. Success in your role as an EA is determined by how well your executive is able to function. Demonstrate your ability to balance these by including specific examples in your cover letter of times when you have done the same thing.
For an Administration Assistant role, along with knowledge and experience in administrative and clerical duties within an office environment, basic research, and financial procedures, you’ll need to demonstrate your interpersonal skills.
As customer service will likely be a key part of this role, your employer will want to ensure that you can interact with customers at all levels with professionalism and tact through written and verbal communication. Your resume and cover letter themselves can demonstrate your written communication skills, so ensure that you are selling yourself in a concise and clear manner. You can demonstrate your verbal communication by providing specific examples.
An Accounts Assistant may assist with BAS and IAS preparation and lodgment, payroll, payroll tax and superannuation payments, Bank reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, and month end processes.
We want to demonstrate your proficiency with the systems you have used such as MYOB, Finance One, Oracle Xero, SAP, or DEXT as well as Microsoft Office. Furthermore, you’ll need to demonstrate excellent time management, organisational, and multi tasking skills, as well a high level of attention to detail and the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively.
As a Senior Administration Officer, you will be expected to work under broad direction with decision making and delegation authority. A leadership role, you will provide guidance and support to other administrative staff.
We want to demonstrate your capabilities here by highlighting any leadership experience you have had in other roles while demonstrating a high level capacity for administrative judgement, ability to plan and delegate workloads, and ability to advice and implement procedures and processes for the delivery of work outcomes.
Our approach to cover letters is to assert our key selling points and back these up with capabilities demonstrated with specific examples in the Situation, Task, Approach and Result (STAR) format.
Where our approach succeeds is in the targeted questions we ask to scope the best responses.
Questions to ask yourself for your resume and cover letter, and often the selection criteria will reflect these questions, are:
