Sorry, but no one cares what you want

Should you put an objective on your CV, or not?

Probably not.

Here’s a typical objective:

"A challenging managerial position in marketing at a growing FMCG company."

What’s wrong with this statement?

First, it’s about you, and what you want to do. It’s YOUR objective. Remember that the hiring managers who look at your CV are busy, and they don’t have time to care about you. They care about themselves, and solving their own problems.

Imagine you are a hiring manager, reading that objective above. You have a stack of 100 CVs on your desk, your phone is ringing, and you have a meeting in 3 minutes. You have 18 seconds to look at this CV, before you move on to something else.

What in that objective speaks to you? What is going to jump out at you and make you say, "oh yeah, I should definitely call this guy"?

Probably nothing. It is wasted space. It served absolutely no purpose, except to waste the hiring manager’s time while he scanned your CV for details relevant to him.

Second, everyone else is probably saying the same thing. Ask yourself, will I stand out because everyone else is saying, "A boring clerical job in marketing at a dying FMCG company"? Probably not. So if your CV is saying the exact same thing as the other 100 CVs in the stack, why should the hiring manager call you?

The thing about objectives, then, is they have to be really, really specific. Not just one objective specific for you (remember, the hiring manager doesn’t care about you), but one objective specific for every company, that addresses their specific needs.

And you’re probably already doing that in your cover letter. So on your CV, why are you wasting valuable space with meaningless words?