The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎 ﹘ THE STORYTELLING SERIES (The Resume📑)

Vol. 35: To Summarize or Not To Summarize, "That" Is The Question

Let’s (finally) dig into the ornery beast that is the RESUME’s 📑SUMMARY Section. I’ve kept you cowgirls and boys waiting long enough!

The SUMMARY section of your RESUME 📑 is essentially your career narrative. It conveys important information to someone unfamiliar with your background such as:

1. Where your professional “value lies.”

2. Your professional interests — what you may want to do next in your career.

3. And ideally, it complements the “Magic Bullets” in your EXPERIENCE section, it completes your overall professional “story.”

What makes a great “story,” and what is narrative, you may ask? From the talented content executives we interviewed earlier in The Recruiting Rodeo’s 🐎“storytelling” series, we learned that:

“A story is, essentially, a form of communication that gets a reader, listener, or viewer from one place to another. Narrative is what drives your story — the who, what, why, when, and how of it.”

~ Jason Adams, Head of News Content Strategy at T-Mobile (The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎 Vol. 24)

In Vol. 25 of The Recruiting Rodeo 🐎, Carrie Sloan, Director of US Reputation & Corporate Storytelling at Novartis & founder of J&J’s Global Content Lab, explained narrative as “perspective – who’s telling the story, and the promise that it’s going somewhere. How do you shape the information that you want to convey so that it’s not random facts, or statistics, but relevant and informative? At J&J, when we talked about the company’s philanthropic work, we often said: “No numbers without stories. No stories without numbers.”