Sample Resume Objectives: What They all Tend to Miss
by Roy Miller
Published on this site: October 15th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month
Sample resume objectives. When a harried and possibly panicked
job seeker finds one he thinks is good, he feels like the
drowning man who just got rescued.
But as Shakespeare said, there's something rotten in Denmark.
Or in that sample you thought would save you.
The problem is that sample resume objectives all tend to
miss one thing. It's truly shocking to me that they do. But
they're usually free, and often they're worth about what you
paid.
The thing they miss is that a resume objective isn't about
you.
"What?!", you say, "Of course it's about me!"
That's probably what you've been taught. I'm sure it's what
some people have told you. Just the words "resume objective"
plant a bad seed in your mind.
Those words suggest...no, they SAY...that you should state
the objective of your resume. That's poppycock. There's only
one purpose of an objective statement on a resume, and that's
to state how you can give your new employer profit.
Any resume objective statement that doesn't do that is garbage.
That's certainly where your resume will end up. Those kinds
of objective statements all translate into "get a job."
That brilliantly states the obvious.
Every potential employer knows you want a job. In fact, there's
nothing wrong with saying you want the job. But your objective
statement isn't where you want to do it. You do it in your
cover letter (indirectly), and in the job interview.
Your resume is your commercial for the improved profit you
can add to your new employer. It's not about you, or what
you want. Nothing, and I mean nothing, sells like the promise
of windfall profits.
Sample resume objectives you're likely to find online miss
that point entirely. Here's an example:
"A challenging job in an industrial setting performing
chemical syntheses and characterizations; the ideal position
will offer diverse tasks and the opportunity to work with a team."
Oh boy. Let's see. If I'm a potential employer reading that
resume, all I see is that this person wants a job. Maybe I
get that he's a chemist. Maybe I infer that he's a good team
player. Maybe...I'm bored already. It's too much work to figure
out what he'll do for me.
In the bin. Next!
Don't believe for a second that you simply need to copy some
resume objective you find online. A better strategy is to
steal..ahem...creatively borrow all the good ideas you can
and create your own.
Roy Miller created http://www.Job-Search-Guidepost.com.
He recently published a simple technique to analyze any sample
resume objective you find online: http://job-search-guidepost.com/links/objectives.
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