Action Verbs – Standout Words

Use action verbs to communicate your abilities and accomplishments. A punch-zip delivery keeps these achievement-oriented verbs campaigning for you. The important thing to do is to choose words of substance and power that zero in on your abilities and achievements.

Try not to use the same word twice on your resume – the thesaurus in a word-processing program can give you more possibilities.

Check out 20 Resume Questions Answered for resume tips which explains about how to approach creating your resume. Review sample resumes in our Resume Resources section of our site.

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Action Verbs – Standout Words for Administration and Management

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Action Verbs – Standout Words for Sales and Persuasion

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Technical Ability

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Office Support

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Teaching

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Research and Analysis

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Helping and Caregiving

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Financial Management

Action Verbs – Standout Words for Many Skills

Keywords Are Key to Finding You

Key words are the magnets that draw nonhuman eyes to your talents. Recruiters and employers use keywords to search and retrieve e-resumes in databases for available positions. Keywords are chiefly nouns and short phrases. But once in a while, keywords can be adjectives and action verbs. Employers choose their own list of keywords, and it is important to understand that no keyword list is universal.

In computerized job searches, keywords describe not only your knowledge base and skills, but also such things as well-known companies, big name colleges and universities, degrees, licensure, and professional affiliations.

Keywords identify your experience and education in these categories:

• Skills
• Technical and professional areas of expertise Achievements
• Professional licenses and certifications
• Other distinguishing features of your work history
• Prestigious schools or former employers

Employers identify keywords, often including industry jargon, that they think represent essential qualifications necessary for high performance in a given position. They specify those keywords when they search a resume database.

Rather than stopping with action verbs, connect your achievements. You managed what? You organized what? You developed what? Job computers look for the "whats," and the "whats" are usually nouns.

Employers scanning for management and administrative positions may also search for verbs and adjectives that define soft skills – "assisted general manager," "outgoing personality," "self-motivated." But job computers normally prefer a hard skills diet.

If your resume has the sought-after keywords, the employer zooms you into focus; if not, you're overlooked for that particular job.

Examples of Keywords

Obviously, keywords are arbitrary and specific to the employer and to each search-and-retrieve action that the employer wants done. The following lists provide a few examples of keywords for selected career fields and industries.

Keywords for Administration/Management

Keywords for banking

Keywords for Customer Service

Keywords for Information Technology

Keywords for Manufacturing

Keywords for Human Resources

Where to Find Keywords

How can you find keywords for your occupation or career field? Use a highlighter to pluck keywords from these resources:

• Printed and online help-wanted ads: Highlight the job skills, competencies, experience, education and other nouns that employers ask for
• Job descriptions: Ask employers for them, check at libraries for books or software with job descriptions, or search online. To find them online, just enter the term "job descriptions" on a search engine, such as Google
• The Occupational Outlook Handbook and Dictionary of Occupational Titles (both published by the U.S. Department of Labor) Both books are at schools and libraries; the Handbook is available online at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website
• Your core resume: Look through to highlight nouns that identify job skills, competencies, experience, and education
• Trade magazine news stories: Text about your career field or occupation should be ripe with keywords
• Annual reports of companies in your field: The company descriptions of key personnel and departmental achievements should offer strong keyword clues
• Programs for industry conferences and events: Speaker topics address current industry issues, a rich source of keywords
• Internet search engine: Plug in a targeted company's name and search the site that comes up. Look closely at the careers portal and read current press releases
• 1500 Key Words for $100,000+ Jobs, by Wendy Enelow, Impact Publications
• You can also use Internet search engines to scout out industry-specific directories, glossaries, and dictionaries

Just as you should keep your resume up to date, ready to move in a flash if you must, you should also keep a running log of keywords that can help you reconnect to a new job on a moment's notice.

Mining for Keywords in Job Descriptions

The excerpts below of two job descriptions posted on Business.com (business.com; search on job descriptions) illustrate how you can find keywords almost everywhere. In these examples, the keywords are underscored.

Grammar is Important!

Resume language differs from normal speech in several ways described here. In general, keep the language tight and the tone professional, avoiding the following:

First-person pronouns (I, we): your name is at the top of each resume page, so the recruiter knows it's about you. Eliminate first-person pronouns. Also, don't use third-person pronouns (he, she) when referring to yourself – the narrative technique makes you seem pompous. Simply start with a verb.

Articles (the, a, an): articles crowd sentences and don't clarify meaning. Substitute retrained staff for retrained the staff.

Helping verbs (have, had, may, might): helping verbs weaken claims and credibility – implying that your time has passed and portraying you as a job hunting weakling. Say managed instead of have managed.

"Being" verbs (am, is, are, was, were): "be" verbs suggest a state of existence rather than a state of motion. Try monitored requisitions instead of requisitions were monitored. The active voice gives a stronger, more confident delivery.

Shifts in tense: use the present tense for a job you're still in and the past tense for jobs you've left. But, among the jobs you've left, don't switch back and forth between tenses. Another big mistake: Dating a job as though you're still employed (2000–Present) and then describing it in the past tense.

Complex sentences: unless you keep your sentences lean and clean, employers won't take time to decipher them. Process this mind-stumper:

• Reduced hospital costs by 67% by creating a patient-independence program, where they make their own beds, and as noted by hospital finance department, costs of nails and wood totaled $300 less per patient than work hours of maintenance staff.

Eliminate complex sentences by dividing ideas into sentences of their own and getting rid of extraneous details:

• Reduced hospital costs by 67%. Originated patient independence program that decreased per-patient expense by $300.

Overwriting: use your own voice; don't say expeditious when you want to say swift.

Abbreviations: abbreviations are informal and not universal – even when they're career-specific. Use the internet instead of net. The exception is industry jargon – use it, especially in digital resumes. Knowledge and use of industry jargon adds to your credibility to be able to correctly and casually use terms common to the industry in which you're seeking employment.

Adopt a trick that writers of television commercials use to be sure that they give the most information in the fewest words: Set yourself an arbitrary limit of words to express a unit of information. For example, allow yourself 25 words to explain one of your former jobs. The 25-word limit guarantees that you'll write with robust language.

Remember, when your words speak for you, you need to be sure to use words everyone can understand and that relate to the job at hand.

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