The ever moving target...
Maybe I'm out of touch, having not been active in the job search market for 5 years but last I checked, objectives weren't all that bad. Is it the term 'Objective' that is now distasteful? Should we use 'Executive Summary' instead? To me, they are very nearly the same thing, but I could be mistaken. I will say that if you are going to use the objective, don't shy away from pronouns: that anti-pronoun mentality IS very dated.
Going slightly off topic, I received an email from a recruiter the other day offering me an interview about a ColdFusion developer position because the word "ColdFusion" turned up in my resume. Well, I've never been a ColdFusion developer; I managed a ColdFusion server farm 5 years ago, which might as well have been antiquity. My point is, I think HR recruiting processes these days are very flawed. There needs to be some kind of movement that brings HR recruiting practices into true alignment with a department head's candidate search objectives.
Between HR's abuse of keyword searches and potential candidates being turned away because a particular head hunter was turned off by a resume's structure or use of "dated" lexicon, it's hard to know which way is up these days. Truth be told there are more job openings than there are candidates these days and while there are myriad reasons as to why that could be, one reason HAS to be that HR/recruiters are not doing a good enough job locating and placing talent.
