Reviewing your career history to construct a resume can be a daunting task. Candidates who haven’t been in the job market or updated a resume in several years often find themselves saying, "There’s so much material to sift through" or "Who can remember back that far?" You don’t need to start from Day One when constructing your resume. Instead, use these tips for including just the right parts of the story.

Career experts advise candidates to analyze their backgrounds carefully to select the material that best meets the needs of their target audience. Bill Karlson, a former executive recruiter and author of the book, "Get Top $$$ [Dollar] in a Job You Love" (World Career Achievements, 1997), has reviewed thousands of resumes. "One thing is crystal clear: People looking for work expected me to fit them into a position based on some sort of magical intuition after reading their resumes," he says.

Making the cut effectively requires using the most powerful material at your disposal to communicate your value as a job seeker. "Even with a great economy," says Mr. Karlson, "it’s still up to the candidate to prepare a resume that meets an employer’s immediate needs."

To convey your worth effectively when you have a wealth of experience to draw on, use a common-sense approach to select your information. Your document should emphasize recent achievements, higher level functions and experience germane to your goal.

Your career may be full of impressive results, but the business world measures success by your most recent accomplishments. Consider the former dietician at a hospital in Paramus, N.J., who had been promoted to general manager. When she updated her resume after only six months on the job, she led with her recent achievements, emphasizing results in cost containment, staff development and labor reduction.

She chose to leave out other achievements from her 12 years of managing the hospital’s food-service operation as a dietician. This strategy made the most of her senior-management status, though she’d held it for only a short period relative to the rest of her career. To reinforce this image, her resume’s summary began: "senior manager credited with exceeding profit projections in a competitive industry."

When reviewing the scope of your career, you may, as many candidates do, feel compelled to show each move you’ve made along the way, often starting from your first job. While this approach seems to make sense for a chronological resume, it usually produces a long, tedious document.

That was the case for a senior engineering manager at a plastics manufacturer in Delaware who had advanced through the ranks in non-exempt operational and technical positions after earning an engineering degree.

His first document listed all his prior jobs. However, to position himself for a senior-management job, he cut off his experience just prior to his move into management. He was able to reduce the number of positions on his resume from six to three.

Critical to his marketability are the results he achieved in three management positions: international engineering manager, plant engineering manager and quality-control manager. The sole mention of his advancement record is a summary tucked neatly under the company name:

"Promoted progressively within this plastics manufacturer, which evolved from a privately owned company into an international corporation. Started as an equipment operator and advanced to senior management within the engineering group."

This approach quickly describes the scope of his career and keeps the reader focused on his higher-level functions.

Just as providing too much information in a sales presentation can blow the deal, information dumping in your resume can knock out your candidacy. How much you should include depends on the message you need to convey to your target audience.

Selecting the experience relevant to your target employer can be difficult, particularly for candidates who have worked in jack-of-all-trades positions or cross-functional teams. The first step is to clarify your targets. They will provide the guidelines for your decisions.

Employers want to see a clear, linear path of professional experience related to the same work theme, Mr. Karlson says. "The old message of a directed, detailed cover letter supported by a general one-size-fits-all resume didn’t work 10 years ago and certainly doesn’t work in 1999," he says.

Consider the candidate who worked in the real-estate division of a large financial services company in a multitude of functions including business planning, accounting and information technology. His background read like a crazy quilt; his resume weaved back and forth so much that it reduced his credibility.

He assessed his experience and developed a firm target: a business planner/analyst position within the commercial real-estate management sector. He then was able to eliminate several extraneous bullet points and keep his resume to one page. His document, shown on the previous page, emphasizes experience germane to his goal and demonstrates how he increased and developed revenue sources through his research and analysis work:

"Assisted in retrieval of up to $200,000 in uncollected revenue for operating costs through preparation of in-depth supplements to existing base building systems."

"Conducted analyses of operating expenses. One study brought in an additional $600,000 per year in income from cafeteria usage fees."

By establishing a target and selecting experience pertinent to his goal, he produced a resume that was credible, readable and presented strong qualifications for real-estate management.

-- Ms. Belen is managing director of the Job Search Specialist, a career marketing firm offering professional resume and job-search counseling services in Fair Lawn, N.J.