What do you put at the beginning of your resume?

Don't use Career Objective. To be really honest, no employer really gives a shit about that if at all. It is (fortunately or unfortunately) not about your objectives, but about what you can offer to the employer.

You should add a SUMMARY OF SKILLS on top. This should be able to tell me your nutshell within 2-3 seconds. Make it as specific and tailored towards the specific employer you are applying to if possible. Did I say "Be specific and to the point" ?. Anything that is abstract such as progressive minded, hardworking, passionate leader etc. is usually bullshit. Instead, use words that show what you achieved specifically for the previous employers. For example, instead of garbage such as "Excellent developer with ability to learn and code anything", you should instead say "ABC+ years of experience as a developer in building applications for clients in xxx domain using yyy technologies"

i don't know what you are supposed to put in a "Career Objective" section, but when it comes to the first section of your resume (or the thing to start with), i like to think that the most interesting thing you can put there is a short description of the path that let you where you are today. Sort of what I did here:

http://www.prtfl.io/muellerwolfram/about

maybe you can _afterwards_ follow up with a section about where you want to go from there.

please note that I just tell you what I personally think is interesting, not what is industry standard. But then again, whenever I write a resume and don't care about standards, I just listen to my gut feeling. If anything, it's something that makes you stand out...

You have two objectives with that section:

1) Convince someone they want to interview you before they read the rest of your resume

2) Filter out jobs which aren't a good match for you.

For (1) you should highlight the one or two single most important things that will make a company want to hire you and for (2) you should highlight what your key requirements for a job are (do you want a job which involves a lot of travel, management, etc).

No, not right now, sorry.