What most people fail to realize, or just don’t want to believe, is a resume is used to screen out, not in. It is used by someone other than the hiring manager to reduce the foot-high pile to a manageable handful. So, your goal is to get past this step to the person who can actually decide to hire you.

Following your contact information, the summary is the first major section of your resume. Because most people who screen resumes make their initial decision based on the first half of the first page, it is the most important part of any resume.

It’s the portion where you talk about the scope of your career and those capabilities that won’t fit into a specific accomplishment bullet. It’s also the place where you talk about your “softer” skills like leadership, team building, management, staff development, etc. These skills are more in demand the farther up you climb the corporate ladder.

You also want to cover the scope of your career in the summary. The size of company you have worked in – from a small startup to a Fortune 500 company. The size of teams you have managed – up to 35 people. The size of budgets – from $1 million to $75 million. Other things might be the number of locations where a team was located, the size of the project, the number of languages spoken, etc.

When you look at formatting your resume you have a number of choices: 1. A paragraph. If you elect this option, be sure to put the most important things at the beginning and the end of the paragraph. I can guarantee that the middle portion of the paragraph will be read by a much smaller number of people that the beginning and the end.
2. Bullets. If what you do lends itself to bullets, this is a great way to go. If they are one or two word bullets, it becomes almost impossible to glance at the resume without reading the bullets. If they are longer bullets, they will still get read more than a paragraph.
3. Introductory sentence(s) and bullets. A good compromise. It gives you an opportunity to set the stage and then follow up with details in the bullets.

Now you’ve started your resume. Spend time thinking about career and understand that you will probably come back and modify the summary after you have completed your resume. You will definitely be more connected to the successes you have had in your career then.