by Jason B.
Recruiters will not be impressed with your resume if you use these four words and phrases in the following post.
Words can be powerful. They can work to your benefit… and they can cause problems. This is especially true regarding your resume. Recruiters read a lot of these documents, so when they encounter a poorly-written resume, it sticks out like a sore thumb. They become sensitive to useless, meaningless, and clichéd words and phrases. They learn to hate them.
So don’t use these four words that do nothing but give an advantage to your job search competition:
1. “Helped”
Like all the words on this list, this may seem innocent and innocuous enough. But the word “helped” in a resume does nothing but “help” you say nothing at all. If you write something like “helped the project coordinator implement…” you’ve said nothing. Specifically, you haven’t said how you helped! Think about it this way: the guy who sells hot dogs at Miami Heat games could say he “helped” the Heat win a championship, and it wouldn’t be a lie. Yes… “Assisted” is equally useless.
Instead: Say what you did. Then say you did it “in support” of whatever team you were helping or project you were working on.
2. “Responsible For”
This is another phrase that does nothing but take up a space on a page. There is virtually no phrase that could follow “responsible for” that wouldn’t have the same meaning without “responsible for.” If you were “responsible for maintaining the help desk documentation” then you could just say you “maintained the help desk documentation.” Now the sentence is more active, more concise, and doesn’t bother with abstract concepts like “responsibility.”
Instead: Just get rid of it. “Responsible for” is so useless that you don’t even need to replace it with anything.
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This article was originally posted on youtern.com.