By Katrina Kirsch

Career objectives are a topic of hot debate in the resume space. Certain career experts say they’re outdated. Others claim they give hiring managers a quick glance at your top attributes and experiences.

Whether you call it a personal branding statement, experience overview, or resume objective, a career objective statement is still relevant. That’s because a well-crafted objective lets hiring managers learn about your skills, personality, and career highlights from the first look.

That’s if a hiring manager even makes it to your resume, of course. With an increasingly competitive pool of candidates, HR teams often rely on technology to help sort resumes and select candidates for the next hiring stage. Algorithms pick and choose people based on keywords, often prioritizing optimized language over someone who may be the best fit for the job.

But 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.

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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 …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron