Is Your Resume Extinct?
Ask The Resume Lady
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Is Your Resume Extinct?
Ask The Resume Lady
Engineering Career Blog
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Is Your Resume Extinct?
Written by Diane Karch-Osowski updated on Mar. 19th 2025
The Latest Trends In Engineering Resumes
With so many changes over the last few years, its time to assess if your resume is outdated. I will touch on a handful of items to check for but lets start with the objective statement on a resume. This statement is no longer necessary and this is why.
Let's look at what an objective statement does...it's basically a chance for you to put on your resume what you would like and what you're looking for in your career. It's talking about you, for example, “Looking for an entry-level position so I can use my skills to solve world hunger blah blah blah.” So if you analyze that, it's all about you.
Things have changed in the whole recruiting world. Resumes have always been a tool to convince the reader to invite you for an interview, but now there's a lot more emphasis on a resume being a strong & persuasive marketing tool.
Objective Statement Is No Longer Necessary On A Resume
Present Yourself As A Problem Solver
When I say marketing tool, you are literally marketing yourself for a position, and so what the hiring manager is looking for they're looking at that resume for maybe eight seconds to scan it over, they need to see what you have and can that solve the problem that they have because every hiring manager has got a problem.
Every Hiring Manager Has A Problem To Solve,
Be The Solution To Their Problem!
The problem that the manager has could be that although they have an awesome team, they have more work coming in and they need to grow their team. Therefore they need people to add to their team with very specific skills. Or their problem could be they have a great team already with a certain set of skills, but now works coming in that require a different set of skills so they're looking for a new person to add to the team that posesses those different skills.
Why Include Keywords?
Whatever their problem is, you need to show on your resume that you're able to solve that problem for them. How do you do that? It's about keywords. Keywords are going to show on your resume that you have what they're looking for. You maybe asking, what do you mean by keywords?
Well if you look in the job description, you'll start to see the keywords pop out. They're going to be things about skillset, experience, personality type, they're looking for very specific things to fill whatever problem or hole that they're trying to fill.
Place The Keywords Front And Center On Your Resume
My suggestion to you is to go and scour those job descriptions and pull out those keywords. When you have those keywords make sure to put them in your resume so that it's right there in their face, don't bury it somewhere in either the experience or education, make sure it's right there in the top and you're in your summary, or in your skills section, but make them pop, make them stand out.
Importance of Beginner, Intermediate, or Expert
The reason this is important, just the other day I was talking to a hiring manager, and I asked, “Okay, what are you looking for on resumes?” and she stated “Oh my gosh, Diane! Could you please share with the people that you talk to, you or the people that you write resumes for, and let them know short and sweet is what I'm looking for, and I want to know specifically the skills that you have and the level of experience you have with that.”
So if you have software experience, whatever that software is she said, “I would love to see a beginner, intermediate, or expert indicator next to it so that I know what they have, and that can help me to decipher as quick as possible if they get to go to the interview round. She said, “Because sometimes I only have my lunch hour to review resumes, so if I'm eating lunch I need to quickly go through this because I have a meeting at one o'clock.”
In Conclusion
I thought this was a very interesting perspective and very good information to share with you guys on how important it is to make the information on your resume short, sweet, concise, and give even that extra information on whether it's a beginner, intermediate, or expert-level experienced in some of those software areas.
Until next time,
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Copyright 2025+ All Rights Reserved
1181 Valley Ridge Blvd. Ste. A, Lewisville, TX, 75077