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I believe your future career goals are to be discussed in an interview, not on your resume. Besides, for a recruiter, after reading resumes for hours, everyone’s career goals start to sound the same! Doesn’t everyone want “to be challenged and to contribute to a growing company”?

I hope this helps, Tobby. Good luck!

How important is “career objective” in a resume? As usual there are proponents for both school of thought – some saying you have to write a short description of what you did or what you intend to do in contributing once you are hired for the position and others say, you just write the title for which you are applying.

As someone who have seen multitude of resumes, what you reckon should ideally be written against the “career objective” title? Is it really significant? I mean, do recruitment consultants (or even employers) really bother about what they see against the career objective when they make a decision?

Some believe that you should customize your resume for every application. If you write the resume properly, I believe that you only need to customize it per job function. i.e. your sales resume would be different than your sales management resume, which would be different than your marketing position resume.

In terms of addressing your cover letter when you do not have a name, the key is to remain gender neutral. It really irks me when I receive a cover letter that says only “Dear Sir”.

Only using “hi” may be a little too casual. You could use “Dear Sir or Madam” or “Dear ABC Company Recruiter”. If you are only using the email as your cover letter (as opposed to a formal cover letter in a file) , you can just not use a greeting and just start with the body of the letter.

Thanks again for the feedback. I hope this helps!

1. Now that I know we should write appropriate cover letters for every job and the cover letters gets transhed once read, its imperative we update our resume for every job application too. So does this mean, we should take “more” time in applying for “less” jobs? I was told, quantity matters – whats your take on this? (Assuming I still meet 60%-80% of key requirements for the position for many of the available vacancies)

2. Many job adverts comes with no names attached. How should we address the cover letters for this kind of situation? (I usually start with just a “Hi”)

Thanks once again for your time and wishes for my job hunt.

I have some definite views on cover letters that I have written about in the white paper referenced in the blog post above.

The studies I have read show that cover letters should be always be included , however the format is important. We accept our resumes via email and it is rare that I will open 2 files from the same email. Therefore I prefer the cover letter included in the body of email, or included in the resume file itself. More details are in the white paper.

The lesson your comments gives is that you should consider cultural preferences when applying for a position internationally. For example, when I receive a resume from abroad submitted for a Canadian position, it often includes a picture of the applicant. This is highly unusual here in Canada.

Thanks again, Tobby. Good luck to you!