What Is Your Objective?

Can we talk for a minute about the objective statements that we are seeing on more and more legal resumes? Your resume is supposed to tell a potential employer how you can solve THEIR problems. The firm/company is hiring because they have a need or some other problem that needs to be solved. A resume, legal or otherwise, should be able to answer the question of how you can meet those needs.

An objective statement does the opposite and states what YOU want from the employer. By definition, it can’t effectively convey to an employer that you can help them, but can only tell an employer how they can help you. Sure, it can show that your interests are aligned with the firm, but that is what an interview is for. To put a finer point on this, in over 20 years of legal recruiting, we have not seen an effective objective statement.

To make matters worse, the objective statement is often placed at the very top of the first page of a resume. That’s valuable real estate and a spot where it can immediately frustrate a busy reader who is not going to spend much time reading your resume.

Telling a potential employer that you would like to be given an opportunity because it fits within your career goals is unnecessary and obvious. Instead, use the resume to demonstrate that you have the ability to do the work and your chances of landing that position will increase.