Improving Your CV, Chapter 10: Your CV's Personal Summary section

Part of Course 1: Improving your CV · Chapter 10 of 29 · 12 min

About this chapter

My view on personal summaries: either skip them or keep them to a factual line or two. Most are interchangeable, full of phrases like "passionate" and "highly motivated", and busy readers skip straight past them.

Key points

• After a handful of CVs on a TikTok Live, the summaries all start to sound the same, and that's what a hiring manager under pressure feels too.
• Claims such as "known for" or "dependable" tell the reader nothing; use your experience to show it rather than say it.
• Be careful with objectives; they can rule you out of a related role you'd have taken.
• Keep it to one or two lines of fact, such as your current role or an exam you're sitting.
• Avoid heavy bolding in the summary, and don't use up the top half of the page on it.

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