How to Write a Winning Personal Summary for Your Resume

Whether you call it a Personal Summary, Personal Statement, or just a Summary, it’s essential to get this section of your cabin crew resume right. A recruiter’s first pass at a resume takes a matter of seconds, and the Personal Summary is typically the section that the first pass lands on.

Your aim is to provide a succinct summary of why you’re the ideal cabin crew candidate for your chosen airline. It needs to be punchy and attention-grabbing. This is not the time to be modest.

Although short, your Personal Summary will take real time to write and perfect. Use the guidance below to build one you can be genuinely proud of.

Kill the Objective Statement

An Objective Statement was a standard feature on resumes a few years ago. It’s best left off now, in almost every case, and your effort is better spent entirely on a strong Personal Summary instead. For the full reasoning, see Old Fashioned: Why You Should Cut the Objective Statement From Your Resume.

The Right Length

How long should your Personal Summary be? Remember, a recruiter isn’t going to spend long reading your resume. With that in mind, aim for something in the region of five to seven lines as a single paragraph.

Anything longer and you risk losing the recruiter before they’ve read a single word. Think of it as a series of bullet points compressed into one paragraph.

What Style to Use

Even though it’s called a Personal Summary, write it in the past tense and third person. Remove the pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my.” For example:

❌ “I have 5 years of experience. I received awards for my dedication.”

✅ “Built five years of customer-facing experience. Received recognition for consistent dedication.”

Use short, direct sentences that get to the point.

What to Write About

Your Personal Summary needs to prove you have the skills, qualities, and competencies that make you an ideal cabin crew candidate. In a few sentences, you’re delivering a genuinely persuasive message that you’re the candidate the recruiter is looking for.

To do this, build a bespoke summary tailored to cabin crew specifically, and to the particular airline you’re applying to. Research what the recruiter is looking for and what matters most to that airline. You won’t be able to cover every point in the space available, so choose the five or six most important qualities. For help identifying those, see The Best Qualities to Highlight in Your Cabin Crew Application Resume.

Use Specific Examples

It’s tempting to simply list the qualities a recruiter is looking for:

❌ “An excellent communicator, works well in teams, goes above and beyond to exceed expectations.”

This won’t convince anyone on its own. You have to prove you possess these skills. Use the PARM technique to build a specific example for each quality you want to highlight:

• Problem: Identify a situation where you had to use a relevant skill, teamwork, customer service, resilience, or problem-solving. What was the situation, and what were you trying to achieve?
• Actions: What specific actions did you take to resolve it?
• Results: What was the outcome? Where possible, mention what you learned or how things improved as a result of your actions.
• Measurable: Do you have a specific figure to attach? Customers served, money saved or earned, anything you can honestly quantify, strengthens the example.

Use Keywords

Work the relevant keywords from your research into your examples naturally. This matters particularly for online applications, where your resume is pre-screened by an ATS before a human ever sees it, see Why Stuffing Your Resume With Keywords Will Get You Rejected for the full details on getting this balance right.

Used well, the right keywords also help draw a human recruiter further into reading your resume. Don’t go overboard, though: keywords need to sit naturally in context. Forced or irrelevant keyword use does more harm to your resume than leaving it out entirely.