Does your résumé include a career objective statement? Some recruiters see them as a way to gain additional insight into a candidate’s application, while others don’t feel they add any real value.
Whichever position you take, because recruiters spend on average ten seconds or less to decide whether to reject your résumé or read on, the last thing you want to do is waste any of those seconds with information they find of no interest.
So here is a list of things to keep in mind if you do use career objective statements:
- Keep your career objective statement short – three lines at the most.
- Include some specific mention of what you can offer the employer, e.g. “to use my strong communication and marketing skills to…..”
- Avoid using a generic objective statement such as “to use my skills, knowledge and experience to contribute to corporate goals”.
- Stay away from career objective statements that are so specific they position you as only able to manage a very narrow range of jobs.
- Remember that stating you have ambitions well beyond the position you’re applying for could work for or against you.
- Think about the job description, the keywords contained in the job advertisement, and your research into the employing organisation and make sure that your career objective statement is a good fit.
- Build strong links between the content of your résumé and your career objective.
- Be strategic in the amount of information you provide in your career objective statement – while your long term objective might be to move into a new career path, it could work against you if that is the first thing a prospective employer sees in your résumé.
