Like with most things in life, we have exceptions to the rule. If you are a graduate seeking your first gig, returning from a sabbatical, or doing a 180 and changing your career then scroll down.
Credit goes to Kushal Chakrabarti who authored this piece providing the nitty gritty regarding resume objective compilation.
Which Kinds of Objectives Work in The Real World?
We took a look at the underlying resumes where objectives were correlated with increased hireability. Here are 3 objectives (details modified again to protect the innocent) from applicants who were 1+ standard deviation more hireable than their industry means:
"Seeking a customer service position where I can utilize my multi-tasking abilities and attention to detail to assist in a fast-paced environment. Skills: real-world clerical experience, organizational skills, interpersonal skills."
"Summa cum laude graduate with BS in communications studies, graduated May 2015. Proficient in Spanish."
"Experienced with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux OSes; popular social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram); OpenTable, AldeloPRO, and NoWait restaurant management software"
And here again are the 3 mediocre, low-hireability ones from above (these were all 1+ standard deviation below their industry hireability means):
"Focused and hard-working individual looking to develop new skills to serve the greater good."
"Ambitious student working towards a B.S. in Epidemiology (pending graduation May, 2019)."
"To acquire, and maintain employment. To utilize the training and skills I’ve received in the past 5 years."
What do you see? Here’s what I see in the low-hireability objectives:
They were generic and basically conveyed zero information to a hiring manager.
They spoke to the applicants’ wants & desires (not the hiring managers’ wants & desires).
Worse, they sometimes contained spelling or grammar mistakes. (Strictly speaking, the above weren’t grammatically incorrect, but two had awkward punctuation.)
On the other hand, the increased-hireability objectives all name-drop specific qualifications. In fact, they’re almost not even real objectives! They’re objective sections acting as a trojan horse to casually name-drop qualifications in the first few words of the resume. That’s brilliant!
In other words, good objectives weren’t actually objectives at all: rather than summarizing their own personal objectives, well-crafted objective statements gave their audience (hiring managers) what they wanted instead.
Resume Tip: If you have to include an objective, don’t talk about your own wants and desires. Instead, use it to casually name-drop a few of your skills that might appeal to hiring managers (in over-saturated fields) or summarize your motivation (in mission-driven fields).
What Can You Do?
We understand sorting through all the conflicting job search advice (and, hell, even the sheer amount of advice) can be overwhelming. That’s why we try to boil everything down to specific, actionable tips for your resume and back up everything we can with real-world data and concrete examples [*].
Resume Tip: Barring a few exceptions (less than 8 months of work experience, the list of industries above), you should delete your objective ASAP. [+30% HIREABILITY BOOST]
[* If they’re mining your data to sell you crap you don’t need, why not mine their data to help you get a job instead? That’s what we think at least.]
Even so, in just this post itself, we suggested 4 new resume tips. In total, across our six The Science of the Job Search posts this year, we’ve suggested a total 39+ real-world resume & job search tips. (I stopped counting after awhile.) They’re all highly actionable, data-driven tips but honestly, it’s just hard to keep track of it all after awhile.