Bad Things
Jason Truesdell
Inappropriate Objectives
First piece of advice: don't write an "Objective" statement in
your resume.
Not every manager out there agrees with me, as many employers would
prefer to see a description of what you're interested in so they can
place you more effectively.
But objectives usually suffer from one of two major errors: They aren't
appropriate for the jobs the employer has available, or they sound lofty
and pretentious.
Right objective, wrong job
Maybe what you really want to do is to is telecommute to work while
wearing your pajamas in a small resort town a few hundred miles away
from your employer.
Or maybe you want to become a software tester and write UI automation
code for a next-generation word processor.
But if I'm offering a position for which telecommuting isn't an option
or the team I'm staffing needs someone who can automate testing for the
macro language of a spreadsheet package, I may assume you're not
interested.
You should target your resume carefully, but realize that when you send
it in, in every likelihood, teams other than the one you're applying for
will see your resume. Managers pass around candidate resumes all the time.
Maybe your skill set precisely matches what a particular team needs, but
if they see a mismatched objective at the top of your resume, they may
decide that you're not interested before you even find out there's a job
opportunity.
High school and college tend not to prepare you for the huge range of
job descriptions out in the real world. If you studied computer science in
college, you might know about job titles like "program manager",
"software developer", "software tester", and
"technical writer". But you may not know about positions like
"software design engineer in test", "online help
developer", and so on. Mixed job descriptions are commonplace, and
unfamiliar titles are created all the time as companies try out new
product development models and try to solve new types of problems.
If you get too specific in your career objective, you may lock yourself
out of all sorts of opportunities that can prepare you better for a
position that matches your long-term career goals.
Too lofty to be meaningful
"I want a challenging job as a software architect in a fast-paced
high-tech company". The only two words that have any meaning to me
as a hiring manager are "software architect", and depending on
your job experience and how my company uses that job title, it may sound
like a joke when I read it on your resume.
Rather than say something that doesn't mean much, say nothing. It takes
up space that you could be using to show the value you would add as an
employee.
What to do
The safest thing when targeting your resume to a specific type of job is
to make your resume demonstrate the skills you have which are applicable
to that job.
If you have a job already and you're not likely to lose it in the near
future, go ahead and write specific objectives; you can avoid calls
about unsuitable jobs and you can prevent yourself from wasting the time
of hiring managers.
But very few people are capable of writing terse objective statements that
add any value to their resume. If you aren't confident that your
objective statement will improve your chances of finding a job, don't write
one.
If you write anything, keep it simple but not narrow.
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