There are ways to ensure your career objective works for you, instead of against you. Let’s look at what a career objective is and how to make yours meet today’s resume standards.
What is a Career Objective?
A career objective is a succinct paragraph that summarizes your professional experiences, skills, and goals. It is usually two to three sentences long and sits at the top of your resume, under your name and contact information.
Your career objective is one of the first pieces of information hiring managers will see when scanning your resume, so it has to stand out. You can do this in several ways, like tailoring the objective to the role you’re applying for, adding top keywords, and highlighting relevant skills. The result should be a concise summary that’s clear, actionable, and compelling. Bonus if it hints at your personality.
But what does that look like? Here are the steps you can follow to craft a great career objective for any role.
How to Write a Career Objective
1. Understand the job description.
It’s easy to copy and paste information for your career objective from a job description. But to show originality and thought, you have to understand what a hiring manager truly wants.
Do this by looking for the most in-demand skills or characteristics for the role. These are often listed within the job description under a section labeled “Required Skills” or “Core Responsibilities.” You can find the right skills or traits to include by cross-referencing the list to any additional descriptions about the company or position.
If you can tell it’s a fast-paced work environment, for example, the ability to multi-task and develop efficient processes are good skills to highlight within your career objective.
It’s also important to consider the job-specific software you may need for a position. For technical roles like SEO Marketing Managers, tools such as Ahrefs, Google Analytics, or DeepCrawl are needed to perform audits and analysis. Make sure to note the software requirements so you can reference one or two in your objective.
Here’s a sample job description for a Growth Marketing Manager in the foodservice industry that shows both the software requirements and the company personality.
Once you comb through the job description, create a list of the top 10 traits and skills you want to include in your statement. You may not use all of them, but it’s good to have options as you write.
2. Know your value.
If you’re deep in the job hunt, you can probably recite your strengths in your sleep. Instead, write down the specific ways you add value to your list of skills and traits.
These can include your strengths, degrees, licenses, or certifications. It’s also worth mentioning any strong connections you have, such as working for top-tier clients or experience speaking at industry events. Just make sure the experience is relevant to the company, industry, and role.
Let’s say you’re applying to a Community Marketing Manager position and have a proven track record of running an ambassador program. The company wants candidates with experience leading teams and implementing community programs.
You can highlight your value by including a statement like this in your career objective: “Experience developing an ambassador program that elevated diverse voices and united micro-communities into one passionate group.”
Again, look to the job description to understand how you can most add value to the company.
3. Keep it concise.
A career objective should be no more than three sentences. Your resume still needs to include your work experience, core skills, education, volunteer experience, and certifications.
Write a draft of your career objective using the list you created in steps one and two. Your first few drafts may be more than three sentences. That’s okay. Try to remove any excessive language, like “that,” “a,” “the.” And don’t worry too much about using complete sentences.
Source: HubSpot