How to Write an Effective Objective for Your Medical Assistant Resume
It may be a challenge determining what skills, experience, and even fonts you should choose when crafting your medical assistant resume. But with the average recruiter spending less than 7 seconds reviewing an individual resume, you need to make sure the job opportunities you are applying for aren’t ending as a fast track to the round file. The best way to grab your prospective employer’s attention is to focus on the first thing they’ll read: your objective.
What Is a Resume Objective?
As a medical assistant among droves of competitors with similar experience and qualifications to your own, you’ll need to make yourself stand out with more than a bulleted list of accomplishments. The objective serves to introduce you as a candidate by outlining briefly, and clearly, your goals for employment. In one or two sentences, it should highlight both what you’ve done and what you hope to achieve. Your resume objective should not only sell you as a capable medical assistant, but should quickly give your employer a snapshot of what makes you different, what your strengths are, and how you would fit on the team.
Do I Really Need an Objective?
Even though writing an objective is completely optional, and some experts claim summaries to be the way of the future, a summary won’t tell an employer much more than where you are. An objective gives them an idea of where you are going. Summaries tend to run longer than objectives and are intended to show off the experience level of someone established in a career.
If you are new to the workforce, are changing careers, or are entering a specialized field after receiving necessary qualifications, the objective will be your foot in the door of your new career.
What to Include in Your Medical Assistant Objective
Have you browsed through a few sample resumes online and thought, “Man … these sound pretty plain. I should go for something more original.”? If so, stop.
It hurts to hear, but this is the time you may want to kill your darlings and go for straight-laced professionalism. Without a 30-year track record of demonstrated perfection in your field, it will be difficult to convince a recruiter during their 6.25 seconds of review that your use of puns and fancy adjectives makes you the best choice for the job. Especially as a medical assistant, it is critical that you portray the level of professional decorum that will be expected of you in the workplace.
Instead of wordplay, you want to hone in on keywords that recruiters are already scanning for in your first few lines. Integrating these keywords into your objective will characterize you as a high-quality candidate right off the bat, leaving potential employers more open to reading your resume in its entirety.
When figuring out which keywords to include, keep in mind that you should be tailoring your resume to the job you are applying for. Copy-paste applications can easily backfire when they are too general to elevate you above the competition. Think about this: the last time you saw a job posting that interested you, what was your reaction? Most likely you read through the description of duties and desired qualifications and thought, Hey, that sounds perfect for me!
With that in mind, your objective should reflect exactly what makes a position perfect for you over anyone else. If the posting is seeking a highly organized medical assistant with considerable skill in verbal communication and experience with MEDx software, then you’ll want to highlight in your objective your organization, verbal communication, and any experience you have with the software this facility uses. The key takeaway here is, most employers will be very up front with what qualifications they are seeking in their candidates, so it is wise to customize your objective to show how you are exactly what they are looking for.
What to Keep in Mind While Drafting Your Resume Objective
Brevity is your friend. As mentioned before, your objective should not go over two sentences, and in many cases, just one will suffice. Either way, you need to ensure you are including who you are (your title), the value you can bring to the company (qualifications), and your career goal(s) (what you hope to achieve through this position).
Integrating your title may seem awkward at first, so it may help to start off with those keywords you fished for while reading the job description, then add the title where it reads best. Using the previous example, we could start with a qualifier that describes the candidate and go from there:
Organized, patient-oriented medical assistant seeks position in dermatologist’s office.
This is a simple, yet effective way to get straight to the point. Many people find rewriting easier than writing, so don’t shy away from reworking your objective until it flows well and portrays you accurately. If you are a career-changer, you can include some relevant experience as well.
Organized, patient-oriented medical assistant with seven years of retail pharmacy experience seeks position in dermatologist’s office.
Lastly, you can add in any education you know hiring managers are on the lookout for, as well as details about your goals and what you can do to help the company achieve its own. If it starts getting wordy, don’t hesitate to break it into two sentences.
Organized, patient-oriented medical assistant with seven years of retail pharmacy experience and AAMA certification. Seeking to leverage strong verbal communicative skills and extensive clinical knowledge toward position in dermatologist’s office.
It may take a few drafts to get it just how you like, but one thing that helps tremendously is reading your writing out loud after you’ve finished. It will help you determine if the words flow well together or if they come off as a little stiff.
Northwestern College’s Medical Assistant program prepares students with hands-on training in classroom and laboratory settings. Instruction focuses on patient preparation, performing laboratory procedures and electrocardiograms, and strengthening communication skills.
Learn more about Northwestern College’s flexible education options that put your career first at https://nc.edu/.