We’re going to fix your resume objective.
The first line of your resume is critical. If you don’t make a good first impression, you won’t get a second chance.
When a hiring manager reads your resume for the first time, often they will be will be screening a lot of resumes. Your resume will be just one more that needs to be read.
Hiring managers spend very little time on each resume. Many only get a fifteen to thirty second look. This means the first line of your resume is critical. It needs to sell your potential.
We’re going to walk through some easy steps to fix your resume intro. First we need an example to illustrate each step. We’ll use an example that is typical.
Objective: Seeking a challenging position with a highly successful company offering exceptional career growth opportunities where I can utilize my skills and abilities.
Your objective is probably better than this one. This objective doesn’t say anything other than the applicant wants a job. Objectives like this are fairly common, and it will provide a good starting point.
In just a few minutes, you can transform your resume into a much more effective sales pitch.
We don’t like to think of our resume as a sales pitch, but it is. It’s tough to consider how to sell yourself, but if you want to land more interviews and job offers, you need to sell. So, let’s get down to business and create a resume introduction that will work for you!
1. Specify the Position You Want
Your objective needs to be specific. Don’t tell a hiring manager you want a job. Tell them what job you want. Our original objective is really terrible, and one of the biggest reasons is that it doesn’t have a true objective.
We can easily fix this. For this article, we’re going to use a Senior Accountant role in a publicly traded company as the goal of this job seeker.
Our new objective is:
Objective: Seeking a challenging position as a Senior Accountant with a highly successful company offering exceptional career growth opportunities where I can utilize my skills and abilities.
2. Customize Your Resume Intro
When you apply for a job, your resume is a sales pitch designed to persuade the hiring manager to interview you (and ultimately hire you). You need to customize your resume to the job to maximize the effectiveness of your sales pitch.
If you were talking with an architect about building your dream home, a nice 5 br home with skylights, a three car garage and a pool. Then, he shows you his design. It’s the same design he’s shown every prospect – a cookie cutter 3 br home that doesn’t have any of the feature you want, and looks nothing like your dream home. What would you think?
Well, the hiring manager looking for a software developer who is an expert with Ruby on Rails isn’t going to be interested if you don’t demonstrate significant development experience with Ruby on Rails. A generic, one-size-fits-all resume isn’t going to be very effective.
Read the job description very closely. Research the company. Network with people who can tell you what the hiring manager wants in a candidate. The more you can learn about the needs of the hiring manager, the better. You may not be able to find someone who knows the hiring manager, but you need to learn as much as you. After you do this, you will know what to highlight in your resume’s intro section.
We’ve done our research, and the key skills for this example are corporate accounting experience, financial reporting, financial analysis, and experience with mergers and acquisitions.
3. Add Critical Skills
Your Resume intro section should have several skills listed. Typically, three to five featured skills is a good number. You may list some associated secondary skills, but the primary lists of skills should be short. You want to focus on what the hiring manager wants.
Our new objective now looks like this:
Objective: Seeking a challenging position as a Senior Accountant with a highly successful company offering exceptional career growth opportunities where I can utilize my financial analysis, corporate accounting, financial reporting and M&A experience.
4. Add a statement of skill level
When you add skills, it is helpful to show your skill level. There are different ways to do this. You can list a qualifier, such as expert, experienced, proficient or familiar to the skill. You can also add years of experience working with the skill. Better than these qualifiers is to provide an accomplishment demonstrating successful use of the skill, but we’ll get to adding accomplishments in a minute. For now, let’s just add some qualifiers.
New Objective Statement:
Objective: Seeking a challenging position as a Senior Accountant with a highly successful company offering exceptional career growth opportunities. Highly experienced with financial analysis and corporate accounting. Responsible for assisting in the preparation and filing of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including M&A activity during three of those years.
5. What’s In It For Them (WIIFT)
Your objective isn’t about what you want. It’s about selling your potential value to an employer. Get rid of everything that relates to something you want.
In our example, a lot of it is focused on what the applicant wants. These elements are in bold:
Objective: Seeking a challenging position as a Senior Accountant with a highly successful company offering exceptional career growth opportunities. Highly experienced with financial analysis and corporate accounting. Responsible for assisting in the preparation and filing of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including M&A activity during three of those years.
Let’s just get rid of those. They do nothing to help sell your value.
New Objective:
Objective: Senior Accountant highly experienced with financial analysis and corporate accounting. Responsible for assisting in the preparation and filing of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including M&A activity during three of those years.
6. Get rid of the word “Objective”
Our intro section is looking less and less like an objective, and more like a professional summary / career summary. It’s time to lose the “Objective.”
I’m going to call our example intro a Professional Summary going forward, since it isn’t an objective any more.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant highly experienced with financial analysis and corporate accounting. Responsible for assisting in the preparation and filing of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including M&A activity during three of those years.
7. Add some branding
Our new intro section is still fairly pathetic. It is a weak statement of skills. The improvement over the original is easy to see, but we still have a long way to go. We need something to create a brand. We’re trying to get this candidate hired, so we need to create a brand that is attractive to a hiring manager.
A good way to start to create a brand is to add a title to the section. We just dropped “Objective.” We can add a generic title like “Professional Summary” or “Career Summary.” These would be ok.
Professional Summary
Senior Accountant highly experienced with financial analysis and corporate accounting. Responsible for assisting in the preparation and filing of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including M&A activity during three of those years.
The branding we added is purely an image of professionalism. The intro looks better with a title and calling it a professional summary sounds good. Although beneficial, this probably the weakest improvement we could make to the branding and still call it an improvement.
Instead of a generic title, let’s add something conveys a brand directly related to the role. We could highlight a job title or key skill. For example, we could title this Senior Accountant, Financial Analyst, M&A Accountant, or Financial Reporting Analyst.
The choice of titles should be focused on the brand that you want to convey. It is important that the brand is backed up by your experience. Don’t put M&A Accountant if you have never worked on a merger or acquisition. All it will do is make the hiring manager think you were trying to mislead them. Integrity is really important and you don’t want to do anything that would comprise the hiring manager’s image of your honesty.
For this example, we’ll go with Senior Accountant. This is a very common job title and would be well understood throughout the accounting field. Since we are highlighting Senior Accounting as a title for the resume, it is too repetitive to put keep at the start of the first line. We could put something else there like Financial Analyst, but for now, we’ll just drop Senior Accountant after in the first line.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced with financial analysis and corporate accounting. Responsible for assisting in the preparation and filing of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including M&A activity during three of those years.
Note: It may be tempting to take the title of the job posting and use that as your branding title. That can work if the job title is generic, but will not work if the job title is highly unusual and uses company jargon. For example, if you are from the automotive industry and are applying for an accounting position in an HVAC manufacture. The job title could be something like “Chiller division revenue recognition accountant III.” Trying to brand yourself with this won’t work. It would be clear that your copied this from the job posting. Use a more general title. You might tailor it to Revenue Recognition Accountant, but a more general Accountant or Senior Accountant is probably better.
8. Add more impactful language
Phrases like “responsible for” are weak. We can make this stronger by using action verbs where ever possible. In general, avoid using “responsible for” anywhere in your resume. You will need to use this some places, but minimize those.
Being responsible for something doesn’t say anything. The Captain of the Titanic was responsible for commanding the ship, but that didn’t turn out so well. You want to demonstrate success and accomplishment, and all “responsible for” tells a hiring manager is what you were supposed to do – not what you actually did.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced financial analyst and corporate accountant with a track record of accomplishment. Prepared sections of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including significant contributions to M&A reporting during three of those years.
9. Add Accomplishments
Now, it’s time to show your value. Stating that you are good at something is ok, but if you want to make a strong impact, you need to show your accomplishments. Below are a few examples of accomplishments that we could add for our hypothetical candidate.
Developed macros to automate routine financial analysis tasks, allowing a reduction in the month end close cycle by one day.
Performed a detailed financial review of key expense accounts in a recently acquired company, identifying cost savings opportunities that saved $350,000 in the first full year.
Managed the month end close process in the Controller’s absence.
These highlight specific accomplishments that will hopefully relate to the job the candidate is applying for. If they don’t apply, then we should find something else. Remember, every step in this process, we are trying to sell the candidate’s potential value.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced financial analyst and corporate accountant with a track record of accomplishment. Prepared sections of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including significant contributions to M&A reporting during three of those years. Developed macros to automate routine financial analysis tasks, allowing a reduction in the month end close cycle by one day. Performed a detailed financial review of key expense accounts in a recently acquired company, identifying cost savings opportunities that saved $350,000 in the first full year. Managed the month end close process in the Controller’s absence.
10. Break up paragraphs and bullet accomplishments
The content of our intro is getting better, but the format is really bad. People hate reading big paragraphs. If they see a large block of text, they are likely to read the first line and skip to the next section. If the hiring manager did that with our intro, the accomplishments would be skipped.
There is no point to adding something if it isn’t going to be read.
How can we get the hiring manager to read the accomplishments? Separate them from the skills summary, and bullet them. They will stand out and get attention. People are typically drawn to bulleted lists. We assume that’s where the important stuff it. You can use that by putting the important stuff in a bulleted list and the less important stuff in a paragraph.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced financial analyst and corporate accountant with a track record of accomplishment. Prepared sections of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including significant contributions to M&A reporting during three of those years.
-
Developed macros to automate routine financial analysis tasks, allowing a reduction in the month end close cycle by one day.
-
Performed a detailed financial review of key expense accounts in a recently acquired company, identifying cost savings opportunities that saved $350,000 in the first full year.
-
Managed the month end close process in the Controller’s absence.
11. Add titles to the accomplishments
Accomplishments are the sizzle on a resume. Education, experience, skills, certifications, and just about everything else provides your qualifications. There are a lot of qualified candidates. To stand out, you need so show what value you delivered in the past.
Bulleting the accomplishments is a good start, but we can do more. Adding a title to each accomplishment bullet will help draw attention to them and highlight the significance of the bullet.
The title should be a short phrase, and it should highlight the value the accomplishment provided.
For our three accomplishments, we could use titles like:
Reduced Closing Cycle, Cut Month End Close, or Automated Processes
Saved $350,000, Reduced Expenses, Identified Cost Savings
Leadership, Managed Closing
The goal of these titles is to get the hiring manager to read the accomplishment and to demonstrate your value. Tailor the titles to the job description.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced financial analyst and corporate accountant with a track record of accomplishment. Prepared sections of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including significant contributions to M&A reporting during three of those years.
-
Reduced Closing Cycle: Developed macros to automate routine financial analysis tasks, allowing a reduction in the month end close cycle by one day.
-
Saved $350,000: Performed a detailed financial review of key expense accounts in a recently acquired company, identifying cost savings opportunities that saved $350,000 in the first full year.
-
Leadership: Managed the month end close process in the Controller’s absence.
12. Add Skills
At the beginning, we talked about highlighting a few key skills. It is important to highlight skills that are relevant to the job and to focus on a limited number. If you try to highlight too many skills, it will dilute the impact.
Now that we have established a few key skills, and demonstrated them with accomplishments, we can add some supporting skills. These should complement the primary skills and show added depth of expertise. The supporting skills will also include technical skills.
Don’t add a ton of skills here. Some resumes will list 50 or 60 or more skills. A hiring manager doesn’t want to read every skill you have. Many more basic skills will be implied by higher level more sophisticated skills.
You also do not want to list skills unrelated to the job.
New Professional Summary:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced financial analyst and corporate accountant with a track record of accomplishment. Prepared sections of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including significant contributions to M&A reporting during three of those years.
- Reduced Closing Cycle: Developed macros to automate routine financial analysis tasks, allowing a reduction in the month end close cycle by one day.
- Saved $350,000: Performed detailed financial review of key expense accounts in a recently acquired company, identifying cost savings opportunities that saved $350,000 in the first full year.
- Leadership: Managed the month end close process in the Controller’s absence.
Skills: SAP, Crystal Reports, Excel, Financial Reporting, SOX Compliance, Budgeting and Forecasting, Business Analytics, M&A Accounting, Due Diligence
13. Get a second opinion
Once your career summary is finished, ask a few people to review it. You want to make sure it is clear, concise and conveys the value you offer.
There are two different types of reviewers you should consider. First, ask someone that knows your career. You want them to tell you how you can better convey your value. In our example, the accountant listed due diligence as a skill, but didn’t provide any detail. The friend might suggest highlighting a major due diligence project as an accomplishment.
Your goal with this first reviewer is to make sure you aren’t selling yourself short. Many job seekers have a tendency to minimize the impression they make. Don’t do this. A hiring manager will never assume you are better than what you tell them. If you don’t make the best case, you will lose out.
The second reviewer you should consider is a hiring manager that may not know you. You want to find out the overall impression they get when looking at your resume. The better the person knows you, the more difficult it will be for them to look at your resume objectively and honestly. Consider hiring a professional to do a resume review. You will get good feedback.
Recap
Ok, let’s look at the before and after… this is the resume objective statement that we stared with:
Objective: Seeking a challenging position with a highly successful company offering exceptional career growth opportunities where I can utilize my skills and abilities.
And this is the resume career summary that we ended up with:
Senior Accountant
Highly experienced financial analyst and corporate accountant with a track record of accomplishment. Prepared sections of 10K’s and 10Q’s for the last four years, including significant contributions to M&A reporting during three of those years.
- Reduced Closing Cycle: Developed macros to automate routine financial analysis tasks, allowing a reduction in the month end close cycle by one day.
- Saved $350,000: Performed a detailed financial review of key expense accounts in a recently acquired company, identifying cost savings opportunities that saved $350,000 in the first full year.
- Leadership: Managed the month end close process in the Controller’s absence.
Skills: SAP, Crystal Reports, Excel, Financial Reporting, SOX Compliance, Budgeting and Forecasting, Business Analytics, M&A Accounting, Due Diligence
This difference is tremendous. Our original Objective Statement was focused on what the applicant wanted. It did nothing that would ever impress a hiring manager. The new Career Summary is impressive and demonstrates clear value.
Do you want to learn more about Objective Statements and Professional Summaries?
Get my book!
