Top-5 Lists

There is a huge trend in online resume sites to have Top-5, Best-46, Killer-10 and other such lists, they’re often freshly-graduated HR students trying to sound as if they know what they’re talking about.

Because it is ultimately a human that reads your resume it is hard to say whether “references available upon request” should stay on the resume, or there should be absolutely no mention of references and a combination of all flavors in between.  Sometimes, they will only want to see references AFTER they have accepted you as a potential candidate.

Objectives can kind of fall in the same category, situation depending.   For a lot of people objectives are outdated, obvious and redundant; rarely is it advisable to state your objective.