It’s true: the ‘objective’ section at the top of the resume is dead – outdated. That’s because objectives typically listed what the job seeker was looking to get out of employment, a relic of economic growth and a surplus of jobs and a shortage of employees. How times have changed!
Meet the ‘Summary’
The paragraph at the top of the resume is now called a summary, and it’s thoroughly modern. A summary basically condenses the resume down and summarizes your skills, characteristics, and benefits to a potential employer. The summary pulls information from the posting and shows where your skills overlap with those mentioned in the advertisement for the job.
The difference is…
If the summary sounds much like an objective, it’s really not. First of all, the summary is designed as a selling tool. Instead of telling a potential employer what you expect to get from them, you are selling your skills and making a benefit case for your employment at a potential job. A summary is written from the perspective of an employer asking the question ‘what can this person do for me?’
The summary should guide the writing of the resume
The summary is also a handy guide for writing the resume. Every piece of information following the summary should relate back to it, and if it doesn’t then something is wrong – either you haven’t included enough information in the summary, or there are parts of the resume that don’t relate, and need to be deleted as they are irrelevant to the job posting at hand.
