One of the increasingly important sections of your resume is the Professional Summary. Why is this section becoming so important? I have read various articles on Linked-In and in Forbes magazine that indicate that you have approximately 6 to 20 seconds to catch a recruiter’s attention with your resume. If they don’t see something enticing in that time frame, it’s on to the next resume. If that is the case, and after many years of actual recruiting I’m sure it is, the Professional Summary is a great place to encapsulate your career thus far and place it at the top of your resume.
To be clear, when I’m writing a resume for a client, if they have less than 8 years of experience, I refer to this section as a Professional Profile, more of a place to advertise what they can do. If they have more than 8 years of experience, I call it a Professional Summary, or a brief section of what they can do and what they have done. This is an excellent place to start selling yourself, marketing yourself and/or touting your performance and accomplishments. Consideration for a job starts with the summary or profile, making it imperative that it be filled with substance.
One of the most important aspects of writing this section to ensure that as many keywords as possible are in this paragraph. Of course, those keywords or key phrases still need to be in the context of your career, not just words in a row divided by commas. The majority of big companies rely on an ATS (applicant tracking system) to help them through the mass of resumes that some into their organization. The recruiter will perform a key word search and the ATS will produce all the resumes within the parameters of the search that match all of the key words.
If you are applying to a smaller company without an ATS or even a recruiting presence, the importance of structuring your summary/profile with your highlights becomes critical because if your resume is being read manually, you want to give yourself every chance to make the initial cut. If a company does not have a recruiting presence, your resume may be going directly to the owner or a hiring authority. What that means is that your resume should be pristine in order to make the best first impression possible.
Your resume is a representation of who you are and what you can do. Your resume is crucial in that you want to ensure that all of your skills, talents and abilities are loaded in the summary or profile, but also that it is an accurate presentation of your experience.
III John 2
