Mark Murphy shows how to replace resume clichés like "motivated" and "team player" with less common words paired to specific achievements. Instead of "hardworking," try "industrious" and back it with a concrete win, like reducing retrieval time by 30%. Research your target company's language and mirror it back.
Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, New York Times bestselling author, and I want to share with you some techniques about how to make your resume more powerful with better adjectives. And I'm going to draw some techniques from my newest book, Never Say These Words in a Job Interview. But before I show you some adjectives, some ways to make your resume sound more powerful, let me just first share some adjectives. I'm going to strongly encourage you to not use in your resume. These are some of the classic resumes, some of the most commonly appearing adjectives in resumes. Things like motivated, experienced, hardworking, self-starter, proactive, team player, dynamic, results-driven. Okay, normal kinds of adjectives that people use in their resumes every single day, right? Millions upon millions of times. The problem with adjectives like this is twofold. Number one is that it's really hard to stand out when you use the same language that everybody else uses. An exercise I strongly encourage everybody to do: take your resume, take a friend's resume, compare them. See how many of those adjectives, the ones I just mentioned, you all use in common. Honestly, you can even take your resume and their resume, put them both into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT or whatever AI you happen to prefer and have them compare them, have them identify how many words you are using in common. And it is terrifying how much our resumes typically sound like our colleagues' resumes, how much they read like our friends' resumes. And the bottom line is that it is really hard to stand out when your resume literally is 99 point something percent the same as everybody else who is applying for this job. So how do you fix that? Okay, number one thing you want to do is you want to position yourself more distinctly. Obviously, that begins by first substituting an adjective that everybody else uses for one that's a little less common. So let me give an example. Instead of saying hardworking, an adjective that is less common but means essentially the same thing, industrious. All right, so simple, simple fix. All I have to do is open a thesaurus and instead of hardworking, use industrious. But that's only half of it. Once I've used something like industrious, the way you really stand out is add something specific that is truly unique to you. So I might add something specific like I'm industrious, I I demonstrated this by streamlining the company's filing system, reducing document retrieval times by 30%, saving an average of 10 hours per week for the team. Whatever the thing is, but finding something specific, because see, everybody will say hardworking. A few smarter people will say industrious instead of hardworking, but only you, you can say streamline the company's filing system, reduce the document retrieval times by 30%, blah, blah, blah. That is something that is truly unique to you. Instead of saying team player— okay, clichéd adjective— cross that out. Take collaborative instead. It's a less common adjective, but again means essentially the same thing as team player. But then again, find something specific. Facilitated cross-departmental communication leading to a 15% increase in project efficiency and a 25% reduction in conflicts between teams. Whatever the thing is. Put something specific that is unique to you. I mean, truly, you can do this with everyone. If you just go through your resume, find all the times you say proactive, detail-oriented, hardworking, team player, dynamic, whatever. Find all of those words and then swap it out for something less common. Detail-oriented, okay, meticulous, less common, means same thing. But then again, identified, corrected over 200 data entry errors in financial reports, blah, blah, blah. That is how you really pop your resume. That's how you make it really truly unique to you in something that the recruiter or the talent acquisition specialist or the hiring manager, whoever is reading your resume, isn't going to have seen 100 times before yours. One other thing I will note here is if you're applying for a job and you're serious about it, do an ounce of research. So for example, CEOs, if you're interviewing at a company where the CEO, you know, does interviews, makes a press release, goes on a podcast, you know, it doesn't have to be Warren Buffett, but whatever, CEOs like to talk. You can always find an interview with a CEO, even if it's a small 20-person company, there is a really good chance that they have given an interview somewhere, even just in the local paper, talking about something or other, how they just opened a new office or how they're growing the company, whatever. CEOs like to talk, but you can also find other people, but listen to the language that this person at the company uses in the interview. So if you're interviewing at a company and the CEO is talking about their culture and they're like, you know, we're super analytical, we're very data-driven, Well, that's kind of a clue to you that you want to start to sprinkle in adjectives that sync with what the CEO was talking about. Things like analytical, data-driven, methodical, quantitative, perceptive, whatever. You want to key off of what you know about the company. And again, this is pretty easy to find. And truly, if you're stuck, find a press release, Find an interview the CEO did. Again, pop it into ChatGPT and then prompt ChatGPT with something like, analyze the CEO's comments and tell me which adjectives I should incorporate into my resume that would not be the clichéd most common adjectives, but adjectives that are more insightful, but that reflect the culture of the company. Do that and then follow the lessons I shared with adding those specific achievements, and voilà, you're going to be in really good shape. So you want more detail, more tools, skills, all of that? Number 1, like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. 2, you can check out all of my books, including the most recent one, Never Say These Words in a Job Interview. And then of course, go to leadershipiq.com and check out our courses and all the stuff we have to offer there.
