Resume Killers

Imagine if your job required you to read other people’s resumes all day long? You’d go out of your mind. It would be fun reading resumes if people wrote interesting things about themselves, but almost all of us have been trained since childhood not to do that.

We write our resumes in a horrible zombie language, instead. We write our resumes as though the goal of a resume is to sound exactly like every other job-seeker on earth!

Here are ten awful phrases and terms to take out of your resume.

You could do it this weekend!

You’re allowed to sound like yourself in a resume these days — at last!

Not only are you allowed to do it, you also have to do it if you want a hiring manager to notice you.

If you write your resume to sound like every other banana in the bunch, why should a hiring manager pull your resume out of the stack?

Ten Phrases That Are Killing Your Resume

• Results-oriented professional
• Bottom-line orientation
• Works well with all levels of staff
• Cross-functional teams
• More than [x] years of progressively responsible experience
• Superior (or excellent) communication skills
• Strong work ethic
• Met or exceeded expectations
• Proven track record of success
• Team player

What’s wrong with these overdone resumes?

For starters, we have seen them all a million times. We are sick of them. They say nothing about you as a person except “I didn’t know how to describe myself in my resume, so I went along with the crowd and used the same sleep-inducing terms everyone else does.”

Each of our Ten Worst Resume Terms has its own faults, too — let’s examine them one by one and see why they are terrible ways to describe yourself.

Results-oriented professional is the original “say nothing” phrase. Everyone tries to achieve results. Everyone who goes to work is a professional.

It would be more interesting to say that you’re an oxygen-breathing mammal, which we all are although we seldom talk about it.

Bottom-line orientation means that you know your employer has to make money and you want to help them do it. Instead of making this grandiose and boring claim, why not tell us a story about how you made money for your company or saved them money?

Works well with all levels of staff is a weirdly 19th-century phrase, in that it assumes that some people can only talk to executives (what do they do to the lower-level folks — sneer at them?) or can only talk to peons.

These days in the business world, we take it for granted that people can speak to anybody in the company. It goes without saying.

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