Treasury professionals should ditch buzzwords on LinkedIn and resumes. Instead, show concrete achievements with numbers: how much you saved, what you built, what changed. Use AI tools to sharpen your language and let the real results speak.
So stop with the candy floss. I'll put it up here, a screen image for you. Are you a strategic, motivated, passionate, creative treasury specialist with a proven track record, with an eye for detail and a team player mindset? Please stop. Please don't tell me that anymore. I know why you guys use those words. Because you've been told to by sometimes really bad CV or resume coaches. They are stupid words. They don't mean anything. They are just candy floss to the mind. That's what I say about the candy floss. And they're fluff. We don't need fluff. You guys in treasury, you are great. You're trying to sound impressive, it doesn't, it backfires. They just you skip past it. What you want to do in instead is actually grab someone's attention. You want to show what moment. I've talked about this at many conferences, many of my sessions and things. The problem is you sound like everyone else. If you're sitting at a conference, ask them. But what do you do? Oh, I'm a creative treasury specialist with a proven track record. Would you ever actually say that? I hope you wouldn't. Yeah, it's not right. Just stop doing it. What can you do instead? Okay, as I say, you've got the so what moment. What the so what moment is right. You implement a Treasury management system. So what? It gave you better visibility of cash. Ah, that's getting better. But so what did that actually do? It saved the team 50 of the time on cash management, globally, the time spent on it. Now we're getting closer to it. So what that the time save time saved equated to three full time employees. So actually if we give that number, we saved around 400000 in like salary, overheads and everything else. There you go. That's your story and it's not confidential. So I'm not saying give private information. What I am saying is give information that make it real. Suddenly I want to know more. If I talk about those buzzwords, if I see on your CV or resume, immediately I skip past it. Lots of people do. And people in the past, they asked me, they said, oh, maybe I should put it on there. I said, I found that on average 50 of people hate it. They're like, oh yeah. I said, and the 50 of people, you know don't mind. And they went, yeah. I said, so you're flipping a coin, right, whether someone's going to read your resume, LinkedIn profile or connect to you. You're going to take that chance. Would you do that. No, actually, I wouldn't, I won't want it. So instead of. And don't you know if you've got any of these words on your LinkedIn profile, for instance, strategic, creative, motivated, effective, focused, expert, team player, proven track record. You see these all in the newsletter as well. Passionate, skilled, candy floss of the brain, sweet fluffing, gone in seconds. That's if or you people are just skipping past you. What can you use instead? Back them up with things like delivered a result, saving a project. Tell me what landed. So we delivered this and this is what the saving was. And this is that the project led to fantastic, improved. I took a process, a metric, and this is the team outcome. This is what actually happened. Reduce risk, cost, maybe FX exposure. But by how much I we implemented this system, it saved this much in FX exposures over the year. Implemented. If you are implemented, show what you built, not just what you've managed. So you can say, I implemented this. Well, did you really or did you just manage a process? Show actually what you've managed and the difference it makes. So, final tip, and I know it sounds weird, is use AI. And someone said, God, yeah, Really? I was like, yeah, take your fluffy language. And if it's quite difficult and because some of you treasure, guys, you're very much focused on the numbers, the physical facts and things like that, actually, then you flip it into your resume, LinkedIn and you go, oh, actually, I'll go fluffy. No, stick with the number, stick with the facts. But what you can do is get AI to help you get it to ask you some questions and say, clean up this fluffy language, reframe it with some actual examples, or if you're struggling with that, say, ask me 10 questions around these to come up with proper examples. So don't fake it. Show us the difference you've made and what makes you stand out. So not the buzzwords, the impact you made. And let's show us your so what moment. Thank you very much and until next week, thanks. Cheers.
