How to Write an Impactful Experience Summary

An impactful experience summary can help your CareerCircle profile show up to hiring managers and make sure that your resume highlights the most important experience for a role. But it can be difficult to get started trying to condense all of your skills and experience into a couple of sentences.

In this blog post, we’re going to take you through what makes an effective experience summary and the 3 step framework you can follow to write your own.

What Is an Experience Summary?

Sometimes called a resume summary or executive summary, an experience summary is a 2 - 5 sentence synopsis of your work experience, achievements, and top skills. It is a paragraph at the top of your resume to help recruiters and hiring managers contextualize your experience. It is often responsible for piquing the interest of the recruiter/hiring manager enough to get them to continue reading.

Talent platforms, like CareerCircle, also use experience summaries as part of your candidate profile which helps hiring managers find you on the platform.

What Makes an Effective Experience Summary?

Keep It Short

Keep your summary around 2 - 3 sentences. If you have a lot of experience, you can go up to 5 short sentences. Remember, you don’t need to follow particular grammar rules so feel free to edit the sentences down to their bare essentials.

Embrace Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases that people use to search a database (like Google or an ATS). Using keywords in your experience summary, and throughout your resume, helps your resume show up better when a recruiter is searching an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). 

To brainstorm the keywords you should use, look at the requirements on the job posting. Chances are there are keywords hidden in plain sight like, “budget management” or “digital marketing.”

Tailored and Optimized

When you are working on tailoring your resume, make sure to optimize your resume summary for the particular role, too. You don't need to take a lot of time! Your summary should include things like 5 years of experience if the posting calls for 5 years of experience, any software tools that are specifically mentioned, languages, etc.

Remember: Your CareerCircle profile is the perfect place to house your experience summary. When you are applying for a new job you can simply copy, paste, and edit it onto your resume as needed!

How to Write Your Experience Summary

Let’s go step-by-step through writing your experience summary. In this example, we’ll be building a summary for an implementation manager who has about almost 5 years of experience in the software-as-a-service industry, but you can apply the framework to any profession.

Start with the Basics

In the opening sentence, mention your job title or the one that’s on the job posting, your years of experience, and a quick overview of what you do.

Resourceful implementation manager with 4+ years of experience onboarding SaaS users.

Highlight Certificates and Skills

Move on to sharing any appropriate education and certificates you have (especially if the job posting calls for something specific) and showcase a technical skill or two.

Resourceful implementation manager with 4+ years of experience onboarding SaaS users. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Google Career Certificate in IT Support with extensive experience in Microsoft Office and SQL.

Wrap Up with Achievements

Pull the most impressive achievements from your resume to close out your summary.

Resourceful implementation manager with 4+ years of experience onboarding SaaS users. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Google Career Certificate in IT Support with extensive experience in Microsoft Office and SQL. Career highlights include building an automation process to track and organize support requests resulting in a 95% customer satisfaction rate and improving retention by 54% YoY.

Don't have quantifiable data? Applying for an entry-level position? Focus more on some extra skills you can bring to the role. This can be a great time to mention softer skills like time management or communication.

Resourceful implementation manager with 4+ years of experience onboarding SaaS users. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Google Career Certificate in IT Support with extensive experience in Microsoft Office and SQL. Skilled at managing multiple competing priorities at one time and bringing strategy to ambiguous situations.

Remember: If you find yourself at a loss, you can always start by using a tool like Bard AI. Feed in the prompt, “Create a 3-sentence summary of this resume:” and then copy in your resume. For more tips on how to use AI in your job search, check out our LinkedIn.

Ultimately, your experience summary is another opportunity to highlight what you’ve done in the past and how it relates to what you can bring to the role. 

By taking the time to create an impactful summary, you can feel confident that you are proving your worth to every job you apply for!