The Best Way To Pimp Your Resume

One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating or updating their resumes is the choice of verbs they use.  You want to have an assertive voice when writing your resume and especially when bulleting your work experiences and duties in order to add validity to it.  This gives off a  professional, confident, and capable characteristic of you that the reader will pick up on.  Essentially, you will be “pimpin’ your resume” sort of speak by following this rule. Use Power Verbs in your resume!

What Power Verbs am I exactly talking about?  Before the choice of word use, when creating bullets for your job experiences, you want to start bullets of previous jobs using words that are in past tense.  These are examples of starting a bullet sentence with poor resume verbs.

• Helped clean up the store.
• Followed my manager around.
• Lent books to people.
• Played with the kids at the daycare.

As you can tell, they are all pretty weak sentences to highlight your experiences when applying for a job.  Your experiences should ideally reflect the duties of the job you are applying for.  In that reflection, or in addressing those duties, you want to use strong statements with strong action verbs like the ones below.

Sentences with Power Verbs:

• Assisted in the organization of the store.
• Collaborated with store manager in various projects.
• Expedited the book rental process of the library.
• Oversaw and managed children playtime during peak center hours.

As you can see, I used the same duties or bullets as above, but with a stronger action verb or Power Verb.  I also chose a stronger word selection to make the statements much more powerful, projecting the person applying for the job in a high and confident light.

Here is a short list of action verbs you can use to pimp your resume!  You can view more ideas for great verbs to use in our power verb database post coming next week.

For Work With People

For Work In Clerical Jobs

For Work In Management

For Work In Creative Fields

Career Development: “Create the resume to get the interview; perfect the interview to get the job!”

Related Posts

1. The Essence of a Professional Resume

2. The Power Verb Directory For Resumes

3. 7 Ways to Make Your Resume a Winner

4. Top Reasons Why Your Resume Is Invisible and Never Seen by Employers

5. The importance of resume keywords

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Tags: job application, Job Search, Resume, resumes

One Response to “The Best Way To Pimp Your Resume”

1. Transformation Power Verbs For Resumes | College To Careers says:

   April 5, 2010 at 7:02 am

   [...] am expanding on the first part of The Best Way To Pimp Your Resume.  In that post, I talk about one of the best ways to stengthen your resume is by using Power [...]