Michael Specht

An imperfect blog from Australia looking at technology, enterprise 2.0, management, Human Resources (HR) and other random thoughts.

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Words to avoid on your resume

September 28th, 2006 · 7 Comments · Recruitment · 5,027 views

Many job seekers have “resume in mouth” disease, that is they kill any chance of getting a job BEFORE they even get to the interview.  Typos, poor formatting, not focusing on what the hiring manager is looking for, and using the wrong language.

TechRepublic wrote an article a couple of years ago, and created a PDF document highlighting these language issues.  They identified several words/phrases that typically will kill any chance of an interview.  To save you the trouble I will summarise the words here, but to see why the words are “bad” you will need to review the article.

  1. assist
  2. assisted
  3. experiment
  4. Skillfully
  5. effectively
  6. carefully
  7. quickly
  8. expert
  9. mastered
  10. Cutting-edge
  11. detail-oriented
  12. coordinate
  13. facilitate
  14. transform
  15. proven ability
  16. synergy
  17. liaison
  18. Responsible for…

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7 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Bruce’s Blog / links for 2006-09-29 // Sep 29, 2006 at 10:35 am

    [...] Words to avoid on your resume at Michael Specht - discussions on HR and technology Words to avoid on one’s CV (tags: words language cv recruitment perceptions employment) Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

  • 2 Ajit chouhan // Oct 1, 2006 at 7:11 am

    Good one.I’ll add few more…

    Star performer.
    Diligent
    Motivated
    Optimist

    Thanks,
    Ajit

  • 3 Team iitjobs // Oct 1, 2006 at 3:48 pm

    Michael Specht digs out an interinting list of words to be avoided in a resume…

    Did you know words like “assisted, experiment,Skillfully,effectively, carefully,…

  • 4 urbaer // Oct 5, 2006 at 12:50 am

    I used four of these on my resume last week. Surely the words aren’t bad in themselves. Surely it’s the context in which they’re used. I mean responsible for is just another way of saying “I did” if I didn’t get fired from the position (if I got fired from the position after a month, then sure, I was responsible for it, but clearly I didn’t do it well or at all).

  • 5 Michael Specht // Oct 5, 2006 at 6:27 am

    Urbaer, to some degree you are right it is about context. In talking with many recruiters the words can be used as fillers and sometimes to actually hid the real story.

    I have a few of those words in my resume, which needs major clean up!

  • 6 Link Bits - January 26 | H.R. eSources // Jan 28, 2007 at 1:38 am

    [...] Words to avoid on your resume — some of the cliched words you want to avoid when preparing your resume. [...]

  • 7 david // Aug 8, 2008 at 1:14 am

    Um, how about these:

    1) Nebulous
    2) Synergize
    3) Tangential
    4) F*ck

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