Resume Key Words
It can’t be stressed enough how important it is that your resume makes the best first impression to a potential employer. A poorly laid out resume will not help your case and nor will a resume that seems as if it was written by a seven year old.
Keywords
So, what are keywords? Basically they’re simply words describing what you’ve done in your academic and work life to date.
When describing something you “did” try using any of: organised, authored, streamlined, transformed, scheduled, refined, reorganised, simplified and designed.
Research based words can include analyzed, defined, evaluated, interpreted, identified, investigated, appraised, audited, sourced, researched and assessed. These words can be used to replace simple phrases such as “found out”.
Words to describe you “telling people” whether verbally or in writing can include communicated, instructed, advised, recommended, provided or proposed.
If you’ve been involved in helping others to do something, i.e. presenting, training or coaching them, instead of saying you “showed how to”, perhaps use illustrated, demonstrated, presented, mentored, tutored, coaching, trained or even taught instead.
To demonstrate your ability to set things up from start, you could always say instead that you designed, championed, instrumental, established, launched, pioneered, devised or implemented.
Are you getting the hang of it now? Here are some more examples:
Where you’ve improved something in the workplace you could include words such as reorganised, unified, simplified, converted, redesigned, modernized, consolidated or restructured.
Where you’ve run or been heavily involved in projects or tasks any of these words could be used to describe your accomplishments: supervised, led, managed, headed, facilitated, co-ordinated, directed, maintained or spearheaded.
Then there are the words you use to emphasize things, examples include: responsible, successfully, sole, key, comprehensive, versatile.
And to finish off here are some key phrases that you could include in your resume to make it stand out from others: technical expertise, consistently improved, sole responsibility, team player, proficient in, participated regularly, effected change, quality assurance focused, customer focused, currently studying, personal development, self development, financial acumen, business acumen, commercially astute, target focused, assumed responsibility, overall responsibility, industry knowledge, broadened the scope of, well within budget, within deadline, meeting deadlines, exceeding targets, reduced expenditure by, delivered results, etc.
Try where possible to give concrete facts, such as “reduced expenditure by 15%”, “increased profit margin by 20%”, “exceeded sales targets 98% of the time”, etc.
