Too often, candidates applying for jobs fill out their resumes with clichés and buzzwords which are thought to be relevant to the industry or to the specific job itself, but in fact, usage of these buzzwords and clichés usually accomplishes more harm than good. Hiring managers in the process of reviewing resumes who come across these tired, non-descriptive phrases often suspect that a candidate is trying to inflate or exaggerate his/her actual skills and qualifications.
Just as bad, many of these words are used so frequently on other resumes that anything distinctive which you might have on your own resume is quickly overshadowed and lost. For these reasons, it’s best to filter out all those buzzwords and clichés which you thought were helping your cause, but which may actually be scuttling your chances of getting an interview.
Many of the most common phrases like this are listed below, and these are words you should simply leave out of your resume if you really want to have an attention-getting document.
Buzzwords like Leverage and Utilize
These words are generally used in an attempt to sound more sophisticated or more business-savvy, but what they really do is announce to the hiring manager that you’re not prepared to speak normally. Everyone understands that both of these words simply mean to use, and when you include unnecessarily fancy words in a resume, it simply takes attention away from your skills and accomplishments. Remember that the emphasis on your resume should be on your qualifications for the job, not on your writing skills.
Familiar With
This phrase is closely related to ‘experience with’ and the ever popular ‘knowledge of’, and all three of them are likely to get your resume discarded into the scrapheap before your skillsets are ever considered. None of these phrases describes your actual skill level, but all three of them are vague references to the fact that you may have heard about the skill in question. When you’re talking about skills and job experience that you’ve had in the past, use concrete phrasing like ‘five year’s experience’, or ‘worked with this software for three years’.
Proactive and Hard-working
Unless you have specific details which support your claim to either one of these vague phrases, they don’t mean much, and a hiring manager won’t think any more highly of you after seeing them on your resume. If you’re going to use either one of these phrases, surround them with specific details which illustrate the claim, and that will make your case better than a standalone statement.
Core Competencies
A phrase like this is better left to the Human Resources department, or some other group trying to describe what employees are proficient with. On your resume, it’s out of place and it’s not what a hiring manager wants to see. Replace this phrase with ‘qualifications’ or ‘skills’ and keep the wording on your whole document as simple as possible. Remember that the hiring manager will probably be reviewing many resumes at the same time, and he/she is not going to want to translate phrases into real hiring terms.
Responsibilities Include
This is a particularly dangerous phrase, especially if it’s accompanied by a laundry list of all the individual tasks that you performed on a previous job. This is a great way to get your resume thrown in with the pile of rejects. In the first place, a hiring manager is probably going to know all the detailed tasks associated with a position you held in the past and doesn’t need to be apprised of your specific accomplishments. Instead, describe how you personally advanced in a previous position, or how you helped your previous employer increase efficiency in the workplace.
Thought Leader
Any kind of descriptive phrases such as thought leader, influencer, or philosopher, will quickly have you pigeonholed as slightly delusional or self-centered. Discard phrases like these, and simply describe your contributions to a project in terms that don’t seem to be campaigning for a Nobel Prize.
Team Player
This would seem to be a beneficial phrase to include on your resume, but the reason it doesn’t do you much good is that it can’t be quantified. A hiring manager is going to hope that every single candidate being reviewed is a team player, which means it’s a rock-bottom requirement of the job. Seeing it on a resume is pretty much a statement of the obvious, and it doesn’t advance your cause all on its own. If you can demonstrate on your resume some of the professional achievements you’ve had in a team role, that would be much more concrete, and it would show a good quality without stating the obvious.
Unique
There are very few skills or qualifications which are truly unique, meaning that no other candidate has them. It might be worth mentioning certifications that you have because even though these two are not unique, they can be uncommon enough to distinguish you from among the crowd. The danger with using buzzwords like unique is that they appear to be a stretch, an attempt on your part to grasp for some kind of distinction that you probably don’t really have, relative to your rivals.