How To Write a Crazy Effective Professional Summary For Your Resume [EXAMPLES & TIPS]
Let’s talk about creating a crazy effective professional summary for your resume!
The first thing I want to do is to start off by saying that you do need to have a professional summary for your resume. You need to have it there - it needs to be prominent and on the top.
If you don't have a professional summary, you are basically not going to succeed in your job. Sounds controversial, but essentially this is the truth because we want to talk about what a professional summary means and what it implies by having one.
Essentially, by having a professional summary, you are making a statement about how you help solve a particular kind of problem. A crazy effective professional summary will do that, whereas ones that are less effective are saying something very general or what you're looking to have and what kind of a job you want, those are less successful as professional summaries.
To start things off, we want to talk about the essential aspect of having a professional summary, it's literally the difference between getting a job and not getting a job, not so much because of that piece of wording that one or two lines appear on the top of your resume, but more because what that presents about your job - meaning that you have a focus and you have a dedication to helping other people solve a particular kind of problem.
As we start this series of statements about a crazy professional summary we want to recognize that it is essential to have - and you might show this video to a career counselor and they may strictly disagree with me saying, “Hey, that's completely wrong,” and they may be humanly and stridently disagree because their template doesn't use a professional summary and they've done this for months or years. They'll have their reasons, but essentially what I've seen is that great professional summaries mean so much more than a couple of lines of texts. They mean a lot more about the job hunt, and that's why it's essential to have one there because it's kind of like a check against whether or not you have your job hunt in order.
So let's just kick things off. Let's just jump right in!
What Is a Resume?
A resume is a marketing document.
It's a document that we would be presenting to other people and in theory, it's a document that will get read. We can talk about that in a moment because as you know, for so many international students, resumes are being sent out and there's nothing to be heard back from the company after you sent it out.
The resume will be the document that says what kind of problem you help solve and for who.
Now for you, you might think, “Hey, this is also a document that kind of summarizes my accomplishments and my experiences” - and that is also correct.
So it can be this thing that is a summary document, but most importantly, it's a marketing document.
In the Career Accelerator Program, we put together into the category of marketing materials things such as cover letter, resume, and the materials we present in advance of a networking meeting.
Because the resume is a marketing document, we want it to be a document that really attracts people, to want to know more about us, and that's why having a professional summary at the top is so key because it really encourages people to keep reading.
Because when it's crazy effective it basically says that we want to help them solve the type of problem that they actually have, and that's why it's great to have a professional summary at the top.
What Is a Professional Summary?
A professional summary is a statement at the top of your resume, below your name and contact information, about how you help a particular company solve a particular class of problems.
There are some templates out there that are good for getting you to move in that direction to state something, but essentially it's telling the other person I help solve this particular kind of problem and I have some relevant experience in that area.
You put that at the very top because we want people to know exactly how we help them.
Having just the name at the top and having just the education experience to follow does not make a clear statement as well as how we help other people solve their problems.
Another benefit of having a professional summary is the following:
It uses language from that company's website from the job description in your own resume.
We're actually more able to target the resume to exactly what the company wants and when we're doing this well when we actually have this machine operating in a smooth fashion, what we're able to do for most of the resume is that we're not continuing to fiddle with the bullet points.
In the Career Accelerator Program and in my Resume Training, which is a separate standalone training, we can prepare the bullet points and the different sections so that it's stable and it's not changing. But then we only change perhaps at the top slightly the professional summary and the skills or qualities that the company is looking for - we might reorder those in a certain function, certain fashion, of priority depending on the position to which we're applying.
We'll never completely revise the resume. We might only change the professional summary at the top.
To summarize, the professional summary is a statement at the top of your resume which explains how you help these companies solve this particular kind of problem.
Example:
I am a results-driven economics graduate, consistently successful in helping grow the P&L (profit and loss) of investment banks through my modeling skills. Specifically skilled in X, Y, Z types of models.
Why Is It Important to Work on your Professional Summary?
Why would we want to act and spend the time to prepare this?
According to Zety, only 10% of job applications result in interview invites on average. This means that you need to make a great impression! However, the reason why I think it's important to prepare the professional summary is not just to have those couple of lines of texts on the top of the resume…
The reason to have a professional summary is that it reflects your focus.
If you have a professional summary, that means, more or less, that you have identified a particular industry in which you're interested to develop and you probably have a specific function within that industry that you're interested in having, and you probably know something about how that function helps that particular industry or sub-industry solve its problems.
I would also emphasize that having a professional summary and working on it means that you're preparing a piece of your resume that can be easily customized when you send out a new application somewhere. You're actually able to spend just a few minutes changing that single part of the resume and leaving everything else unchanged. That is a huge benefit for you because you're not faced with the prospect of trying to apply to a company and then tweak the whole resume one time and over again, and wonder whether or not you have this document prepared the way you need to be.
In the Career Accelerator Program, we have the training, we have also had a standalone Stuart Resume Training, which walks you all through this.
Working on your professional summary is important because:
- You are emphasizing or displaying a focus
- You are setting your resume up for success to be minorly tweaked or customize to every job description
Do’s of a Professional Summary
A professional summary it's probably going to be just two or three lines of text, and what it's going to do in terms of the do’s is it's going to emphasize what type of problem you help solve.
If you ever want to know what would work as a type of problem that you help to solve, consider this:
You help that particular kind of company grow its P&L (profit and loss) statement of the company. You help grow revenues, you help grow profits.
You will never go wrong if you say that you are a results-oriented or motivated undergraduate or graduate student focused on growing the P&L of XYZ kind of firm through your XYZ, ABC type of skill/skillset.
And then, maybe tacking on one more statement about your specific skill in a particular area, whether it's modeling or sequel coding or whatever it is, or maybe you have the CFA designation or something like that, or you want to emphasize that you pass in a particular past, you could state that there.
It's really just this very short two or three-line statement.
To summarize:
- DO use descriptive terms like results-oriented or motivated one of those, one of those terms - they are going to seem kind of like everyone does it, but just starting off with the word result-oriented is a good way to go because that's the only thing companies care about.
- DO talk about how you grow the P&L. I love the statement and invite you to copy it. E.g. I help you grow the P&L of XYZ type of company through your ABC type of skill.
That might not come to you right away about how to write that and if you're having questions about it, I can give you some further advice if you comment here and I can help you work through that.
What I do with my students in the Career Accelerator Program, is that we actually spend some time talking to people in the industry before we finish our resume.
I work with my students and identify 10, 20, possibly even 30 professionals in that space, have conversations with them to really master what it is, what kind of problem that they're solving in that space, and then we can refine this sentence or if you don't have the time to do that you could just simply follow the template or the follow the DO’s that I'm emphasizing here.
Dont’s of a Professional Summary
Most of the common mistakes that people make when they're writing a professional summary is that it is too long, it might be a four or five-line statement about all of their accomplishments and it might be a summary of their resume.
A professional summary (surprise, surprise) might be a summary of the resume, but we don't want to do that!
The professional summary is not actually a section of the resume where we summarize our skills or our prior experience.
So an example of what not to do might be… “Previous five years experience doing this, this and this and having this, this and this skills.”
And that's your professional summary.
No, no, no, no, no.
We do not want to just repeat what we have below in the resume, we only want to focus on how we help that particular class of company solves a particular class of problems.
So if you're using a professional summary, oddly enough as a summary or a repetition of what you've done below in some of your bullet points, that would not be meeting the objective of the professional summary.
Another don't about the professional summary would be to never change it.
So for example, if you never customized your resume at all, to repeat some of the words - you want to be repeating some of the words in the job description in your resume - you want to actually be using those exact phrases and that exact language where possible within the professional summary so that you're able to use a document that is exactly what the company is looking for.
We want to always be providing the companies exactly what they're looking for.
To summarize:
- DON’T make your prof. summary too long - make it short, sweet, and to the point.
- DON’T summarize your actual resume - the professional summary is not actually a section of the resume where we summarize our skills or our prior experience.
- DON’T use the same prof. summary for all jobs - customize your summary to the language in the job description you are applying to.
Examples of Professional Summary
Let’s take a look at some examples of professional summaries!
For students: “Results-oriented Economics BS candidate with demonstrated experience growing P&L in investment banking. Consistently successful in optimizing budgeting, cost, and revenue-maximizing.
For workers: “Results-oriented data professional with expertise in data integration pipeline. Consistently successful in supporting the P&L of product management teams with proven experience in ETL processes, SQL and Python.”
The formula for students is “Results-oriented [major] [degree] candidate with demonstrated [quality you wish to emphasize based on the job description]. Consistently successful in [second quality you wish to emphasize].”
The formula for people working is “Results-oriented [financial / data / consulting] [professional / leader] with expertise in [key phrase desired in job description]. Consistently successful in supporting the P&L of [consulting / engineering / product management] firms/teams with proven [secondary skill sought].”
I'll be happy to take a look at your examples and work through them with you.
But don't forget that this document, the resume, is a marketing document and if you've been doing anything in any area related to what they're looking for, use words like results-oriented expertise in..., consistently successful in… because this kind of confidence is what companies are looking for.
Hopefully, you can take these and craft your own professional summary statements and help you reflect and display to other people the focus that you bring to your job hunt.
If you're somebody who's looking for any kind of job, just any job - that would be most of the people out there looking today - that kind of job hunter is going to find consistent frustration in their job hunt because they don't have a message aligned with the type of company that needs a particular kind of help.
When you can add a professional summary to your resume, that's going to reflect this focus that you bring to your job hunt, and that's going to reflect that you are the kind of person that solves a particular kind of problem that the firm actually has.
That's going to be a huge help to you in your job hunt to prepare this kind of statement.
If you do have other questions, I welcome you to post here, in the chat, or wherever you find me - on LinkedIn - and we can continue the conversation.
All the best for your job hunt and I look forward to staying in touch and hearing how it’s going!
