As a staffing agency, we read through over 100+ resumes each week for candidates. While reading resumes are one of our main jobs, many other companies are not so lucky. These employees wear multiple hats, such as Human Resources, assistants, and directors, while also acting as hiring managers.
To maximize the time they spend with your resume and not include a ton of fluff, we recommend leaving off the following two words from your resume and replacing them with these instead:
“RESPONSIBLE FOR…”
While these two little words seem to help describe the areas in which you are responsible, it is a weak and generic way to describe your accomplishments and abilities.
Everyone will use this phrase when explaining what they did at their last job, but it does not tell anyone what you truly did to progress your career and why they should hire you now.
In addition to “responsible for” we also recommend staying away from confusing phrases, jargon and buzzwords because everyone is also using them in their resume and you want to stand out.
Let me bring you up-to-speed on all the words you will want to avoid and the words we suggest using instead:
- Deep dive / Drill down
- Assessed, identified, mapped, tested, and verified
- Think outside the box
- Accomplished, completed, delivered, established, and formulated
- Flesh out / Synergize
- Authored, connected, defined, illustrated, and presented
- Game plan / Moving parts
- Advanced, boosted, enhanced, increased, and maximized
- Team player
- Collaborated, contributed, joined, integrated, and synchronized
- Hard worker
- Directed, managed, spearheaded, supervised, and trained
- Moving the needle
- Built, constructed, designed, developed, and inspired
These simple switches in language will create impactful results and therefore allow your resume to stand out in a crowd.