Professional Profiles are they important????

You must admit resumes are pretty boring reading, especially when that is what you do all day.  Recruiters and HR employees read through 100's of resumes a day.  OK, read!!!  maybe more like scan.  That is if you are lucky enough to get past their ATS (Applicant Tracking System).  Now you have to grab their attention while they are doing their 10 second scan of your resume.  Sometimes I think Recruiters and HR employees can scan faster than their computer systems. The Professional Profile is the easiest way to entice them to actually read your resume.

The Professional Profile appears right under your name and contact information.  What makes a good professional profile:

• Keep it short:  one or two sentences giving a brief synopsis of your experience; followed by 3 or 4 small bullets of specific detail related to the actual job description if necessary
• Use key words from the job description.  If they are looking for a Java Developer, don't put in the profile that you started out as a Cobol Programmer
• Years of experience in your field
• If they are looking for a specific degree or certificate and you have it, put it in a bullet in your profile

Action words in your profile will give it a little more zing:

• boosted sales by 23%
• implemented an employee incentive program
• set up a new data centre
• maintained 200 desktops
• converted a 1000 desk data centre from windows to 
• increased production
• decreased customer service calls

Detail not to put in your profile include:

• personal information, ie hobbies, number of children, marital status - you get the point.  Truthfully this information doesn't even need to be on your resume
• opinions about anything, 
• that you can work independently, multi task, hard worker, always on time, etc.  These are taken for granted.
• the word "I"

Finally here is a sample professional profile for an IT position at a financial institution.

Java Developer offering a broad technical background working in the financial industry. This includes 7 years of WebSphere development, 3 years WebSphere portal development and 3 years of WebSphere/WebSphere portal administration experience.  

• Bachelors of Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario (if degree needed from job description)
• Certifications include:  (if specified from job description)
• 4 years experience in building mobile web applications.  (keyword from job description)
• In-depth experience in software full life cycle and design patter

A professional profile is just that, a profile, keep it short, to the point and targeting the specific job description you are applying for.  For some more examples check out this webpage http://jobsearch.about.com/od/profiles/a/resume-profile-examples.htm

Good Luck Job Hunting !!