Should I have a summary section on my resume?
The short answer is no. Don’t include a Summary section. Same applies to the Objective section.
If this is what you needed to hear, you can save your time and stop reading here.
If in doubt, read on to find out why I advise against it.
Summary
Your resume is already a summary of your experience. There is no need to make a summary of a summary.
Recruiters will skip straight to the description of experience. Why?
Consider a typical resume line. “A seasoned professional with extensive experience in server-side development”.
Here you are stating that:
- You have knowledge in many types of backend systems.
- You have a track record of using this knowledge.
Does this add any new information to your experience description? Probably not.
Recruiters think the same way and thus won’t read it.
Your professionalism should be obvious from your experience description.
If it’s not, fix it by writing clear accomplishment statements rather than adding a summary.
Another typical thing is to say that you are “motivated”, “high-paced”, “fast-learning”.
Such kinds of self-assessments don’t look credible. Avoid them both in the summary and throughout your resume.
Want to show that you are detail-oriented? Think about what in your experience demonstrates this:
- You’ve done a complete review of a project’s code to spot security vulnerabilities, or
- You have profiled database queries to find a performance bottleneck.
Tell something about your experience that the recruiter will draw the necessary conclusions from.
Objective
It’s good to have a clear objective. But that doesn’t mean you should list it on your resume.
It never hurts to get to know yourself better.
What industry do you want to work in? From a developer’s perspective, all industries have a lot in common. But besides that, there is domain knowledge. By choosing an industry, you are choosing what domain knowledge you will be gaining in the next few years.
What are your career goals? Do you want to grow as an individual contributor or as a people manager? Do you want to gain deep expertise in a narrow field or be a generalist?
You have to decide what’s best for you.
Use your objective when:
- Choosing jobs to apply for
- During interviews to get more information
- When choosing an offer
Don’t make the recruiter do the work of matching your objective to the job opening.
Start straight ahead with your achievements.
Keep the recruiter’s attention.
Save page space.
Less is more.