In my business, I naturally see a lot of résumés, written by amateurs and other professionals. Lately I've seen a rash of résumés that seem to have lost their minds. Is your résumé "headless?" If your résumé reads something like this, you may be missing a critical section.

If the example above looks like your résumé, you should know that you've missed out on an excellent opportunity to sell yourself. Why? The recruiter reading this resume must go through the entire document to form a mental picture of you. You know, who you are, what you want to do with your career, whether or not you'll be worth interviewing. Will she/he form an accurate picture?

Creating an opening paragraph or bullet list with the heading "Profile" or "Summary of Qualifications" is an excellent opportunity to present your reader with a thumbnail sketch of who you are, what you're doing with your career, and what your most marketable attributes are.

For those of you who consider this type of information "fluff" or "b.s.," I respectfully beg to differ. Surely, if that's the kind of information you've seen in summary statements, then they were misused, like the much maligned objective statement that says "a challenging career-oriented position using my education and experience, blah, blah, blah."

The Profile or Highlights Section is the place where you can sum up all the great information on the résumé, add relevant information that just doesn't have any other place to go on the résumé, and create an impression of you as a living, breathing, unique individual. It doesn't have to be fluff or flowery, meaningless information. If it's done properly, it can add "sizzle" to the steak when being read by a human being, and it contains relevant key words that will boost the number of hits your résumé gets in a database search. Most or all of what is stated up front is backed up by the remainder of the résumé. For those of you résumé buffs out there, no, this isn't a functional résumé per se. Observe:

Then, of course, the rest of Janet's résumé covers the detail-rich, quantifiable accomplishments in each position that back up these statements. By introducing her in this way, however, we don't have to count on the recruiter's ability to sum her up accurately.

So if your résumé is not getting you the attention you deserve sans profile, perhaps now would be the time to sum yourself up.

© 1999-2003 Tracy Laswell Williams. All rights reserved.