When searching for a new job, your resume serves as your
first impression to a potential employer.
Messing up your resume is not only embarrassing but means that you
probably won’t even get a chance to show off your charming smile or to explain in person why you’re the right candidate for the job.
Be Brief
- Worked at J Allen Meat Company in Tacoma, WA and managed the accounting division. In this role, I supervised three junior accountants and led daily meetings with the company presidents with an emphasis on synergistically e-enabling progressive growth strategies. This also involved efficiently actualizing high standards in functionalities in the account payable department. Lastly, I also focused on interactively visualizing performance based niche markets. Tired of reading this yet? I can type more text, but chances are that you'll never even read this because it's at the end of a very long paragraph. What are you up to this weekend? Have you started your journey of self-discovery by day dreaming half way through this blob of text?
- Worked at J Allen Meat Company in Tacoma, WA and managed the accounting division.
- In this role, I supervised three junior accountants and led daily meetings with the company presidents with an emphasis on synergistically e-enabling progressive growth strategies.
- This also involved efficiently actualizing high standards in functionalities in the account payable department.
- Lastly, I also focused on interactively visualizing performance based niche markets.
- Tired of reading this yet?
- I can type more text, but chances are that you'll never even read this because it's at the end of a very long paragraph.
- What are you up to this weekend?
- Have you started your journey of self-discovery by day dreaming half way through this blob of text?
Structure your resume bullets to start with an action, followed by context, results, and finish off by quantifying. For example:
Action
Launched unlimited net worth .com
Context
a financial web site providing visitors with rich financial information
Results
delivering additional unique visitors and advertising revenue
Quantify
generating over 50,000 unique visitors per month and delivering $20K/month advertising revenue (I wish!)
Think you're the right candidate for the job? Using action verbs will help communicate this to the recruiter or hiring manager. Using bad and low impact words won't help you make the case. Since when were you proud to tell your mom that you assisted or participated in something? It's a lot more impressive to say you drove or managed something (as long as you actually did)!
Boring words that don't impress
- Participated
- Assisted
- Contributed
- Supported
- Helped
- Responsible for
- Coordinated
- Designed
- Drove
- Programmed
- Led
- Negotiated
- Accomplished
- Saved
Your resume is already all about you. You don't need to drive the point home by starting every sentence with I this or I that. Also, articles like the or a are an unnecessary. Avoid sentences like this:
- I launched the unlimited net worth .com, a financial web site providing visitors with rich financial information. My site generated over 50,000 unique visitors per month and I achieved advertising revenue of $20K/month (I wish!)
Instead, structure your sentence like this:
- Launched unlimited net worth .com, a financial web site providing visitors rich financial information, generating over 50,000 unique visitors per month and delivering $20K/month advertising revenue (I wish!)