Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Words to Get Hired By
Chapter 1: The Perfect Objective to Sharpen Your Resume's Focus
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Job-seekers also tend to ignore the employer's need to know what the candidate can contribute, instead considering the objective as an invitation to list everything the job-seeker wants, needs, or desires from the sought-after job. A typical self-serving objective reads along these lines:
OBJECTIVE: To obtain a meaningful and challenging position that enables me to learn the accounting field and allows for advancement.
As a resume writer who has critiqued and rewritten myriad resumes, if I had a dollar for every objective statement that contains the phrase "challenging position," I could probably retire. Let's face it, everyone wants a challenging position, so this phrase has essentially ceased to have much meaning for employers. And talking about learning and advancing in the field speaks to the job-seeker's needs, not to the employer's needs. An effective objective statement must address the employer's needs.
A typically vague objective statement reads like this:
OBJECTIVE: To obtain a position that allows me to utilize my skills and talents.
Such an objective says nothing. What kind of position? What kinds of skills and talents? It would be better to have no objective than to have an objective that conveys no meaning to the reader.
Some objective statements start off like this:
OBJECTIVE: To obtain a job ...
OBJECTIVE: To find a job ...
Well, duh! That's generally the reason people send resumes. There's no reason to state the obvious.
Another non-starter:
OBJECTIVE: To work ...
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