Hello Dear,
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Hope you have a fantastic time.
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Today, I wanted to tackle a subject that comes up in 9/10 cases when someone asks me to check out their CV.
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Profile summary/BIO - call it however you want.
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From my perspective, it's one of the most important pieces of a CV for a couple of reasons:
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1) It's on top of the first page, so there's a very high chance someone will read the first sentence (if they read 2nd depends on how much they liked the 1st, but we'll get to that)

2) When written properly, it often acts as a mini cover letter

3) If you write it the way I'll show you below, you will also get a ready answer to one of the most common questions, "Tell me about yourself".

There's a lot to win in this fragment.
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Personally, I literally always read at least the first sentence of a summary because that's just a natural way of reading (going from left to right and starting from the top).

Why do most of those summaries suck?

Because they are boring and use tons of generic, vague wording like "great communicator", "experienced working in small and big teams", "thrives in international environments"
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Tell me you can get useful information out of those.
You really can't as those words mean different things for different people and depend on the context.

So let me give you the secret to writing a good bio/summary:

You write it as a paragraph, but in reality, you're answering 3-4 questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What are my key numbers?
3. What's my key success?
4. What am I aiming for professionally?

And right now, let's unlock those one by one.

Who are you?

This is the first sentence 99% people who will encounter your CV will read.
And the job of the first sentence is to convince someone to read the second.

You do that by being very, very precise in describing who you are in a professional context.
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Let's imagine you are a Game Designer.
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You have a couple of years of experience under your belt, some personal projects, worked on a couple of mobile games, some VR titles, and no PC/Console experience. You are also pretty good with Unity, can work your way around it, don't need programmers for everything and can do some prototyping yourself.

You can write something like "Passionate game designer who mixes creative and technical knowledge to create games people enjoy". And that'd be true.
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But it's just bleigh.
No one cares if you are passionate.
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Sorry to bring it to you, but at this stage, it really doesn't matter. Right now person who's reading your CV is checking if you are who they are looking for in terms of skills and experience.

So first, we eliminate the vagueness. Instead of a couple, we write an exact number - 4 years.
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Why? Because couple means 2 or 9. And why would anyone assume things in your favour?
Think about it for a second. In which situation we are usually vague?
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When we try to hide some kind of info, we think it might not be received best, or doesn't put us in the best light.
It's just a way to protect ourselves.

So we start with precision in mind. Then, we answer the question:
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"I am a Game Designer with 4 years of commercial experience - 3.5 years in mobile (casual and hybrid-casual games), last 6 months in VR. Using Unity in my daily work, I can comfortably prototype by myself."
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That's it. No fireworks, nothing colourful. Just simple, plain facts and information.

Key numbers

Here's where most of the magic happens. In my experience, almost every job has some kind of quantifiable metrics:
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number of projects you worked on,
assets you created,
time and money you saved the company thanks to your solutions,
number of people promoted in your team etc.
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Nowadays, we measure a lot of stuff in our companies, so make sure you know your numbers.
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Because this is the section where we underline what specifically you've done.
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Continuing with our game designer example, since he worked on mobile games and he's good with prototyping, he probably has some experience building games from the ground up, so let's follow with that.
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"For the past 2 years, I've created over 50 prototypes in Unity. Before that, I was working 2 years on a well-known, established title where I was responsible for delivering 10 new features and was involved in live-ops events - I designed 9 of them"

Key success

Here is where we brag about our skills. The main idea is to show you already have the skills for the job because you have already done it. So the key to success is not something you're most proud of. It's not the biggest win in your life.

You need to underline a thing that clearly shows this mf knows their shit, and it would be worth talking to them. ​
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To put it in other words, you could have a world champion medal because you are a fantastic figure skater, but it won't help you a lot if you are aiming for a spot in a basketball team.

So for our GD it might be something like:

"One of the features I designed was very well-received among the players and drove the revenue/retention up by X%"
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Even if you don't have the numbers specifically, that's ok. It's better with numbers because they are easily digestible, but even without them, we can work with something similar to:
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"One of the features I designed was very well-received among the players, and after that win, I started to receive full ownership of future features I was working on"

You know best what successes in your journey clearly say you have every right to be applying for the role, so think about it.

What are you aiming for professionally?

So this one is an optional one, so treat it like a question with an asterisk *.
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It's optional because first, you have to know what you are aiming for.
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Also, it only makes sense when you are tailoring the CV to the role you're applying for, and you know it makes sense to put this information there.

And let's face it, the majority of people have a vague idea, but that's it.

If you decide to use it - that's the main point of your summary.

Everything you've written above has to be tailored to the answer to this question. Because what you are aiming for in the future heavily determines what kind of numbers, projects, and successes you'll mention.

Think about it. If you want to aim for a Technical Game Designer position and become a highly specialised senior in the mobile games sector, then there's a lot of difference between someone who wants to eventually become a Team Lead for a small group of game designers in PC/Console space.

And there are also other skills required for those jobs efficiently, so you'll underline something different.

Sticking to our example, let's say our GD is aiming for an expert, solo role in the future. So it could be similar to what we've already written:

"My professional goal is to become a highly specialised Technical Game Designer in the mobile games sector, ideally working on a mid-core title with live-ops in mind"

What we have already

So, to sum up what we already have:

I am a Game Designer with 4 years of commercial experience - 3.5 years in mobile (casual and hybrid-casual games), last 6 months in VR. Using Unity in my daily work, comfortably prototype by myself. For the past 2 years, I've created over 50 prototypes in Unity. Before that, I was working for 2 years on a well-known, established title where I was responsible for delivering 10 new features and was involved in live-ops events - I designed 9 of them. One of the features I designed was very well-received among the players, and after that win I started to receive full ownership of future features I was working on. My professional goal is to become a highly specialised Technical Game Designer in the mobile games sector, ideally working on a mid-core title with live-ops in mind.

Looks ok, but we can do better. Now that we have the full version, we can trim it, remove unnecessary words to make it even more digestible (and amplify our chances someone will actually read it!)

I am a Game Designer with 4 years of commercial experience - 3.5 years in mobile, casual and hybrid-casual games, 6 months in VR. Using Unity in my daily work, comfortably prototype by myself. I've created over 50 prototypes in Unity. I was also responsible for delivering 10 new features and designing 9 live-ops events for a very established mobile game with 10 million daily active users. One of the features I designed was very well-received among the players. In fact, it was so good that I started to receive full ownership of future features. My professional goal is to become a highly specialised Technical Game Designer in the mobile games sector, ideally working on a mid-core title with live-ops in mind. ​
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Ok, so here we are.
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And let me tell you - this still isn't ideal.
But it is already 10x better than what's usually in this section.
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And because the beginning of the CV is the most important piece of this document, it really is worth dedicating some time and really think about this section.

And right now, you know how to do it. Just answer those 4 questions and you're good to go.

Good luck out there.
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You got this.
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I help people find jobs they want and build the careers they are proud of.
And because I have a background working as a recruiter and career coach in the gamedev industry, I know my shit.
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So if you are feeling stuck in your current role, not sure what to do next or just want to plan out your next steps, just reply to this email.
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I'd be more than happy to see if I can help (but chances are I can - as I already did that for 100+ people)
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Just click reply and type "Let's chat"
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