Does your resume beg for attention or command it? Is it a true depiction of your professional expertise, personal qualities and the remarkable traits that make you the most deserving candidate or do your accomplishments get lost in the crowd?
Did you know that a powerful resume could be your passport to success? Now, you may wonder what makes a resume powerful? The answer lies in the words you use in your resume to highlight your professional accomplishments and project yourself as an indispensable asset to any organization. In other words, action verbs or power words.
With the effective and proper use of action verbs throughout your CV, you can create an outstanding resume with the perfect amalgamation of curiosity and interest in the employer’s mind. Here’s how to go about it.
Action verbs mainly come into play when you have to showcase your various skills to a potential employer through your resume. Since the CV has to speak for you and ensure that you stand out from the crowd, it is essential that it creates the right impact.
- Managerial Skills: “Worked with a team of 5” or “Supervised an energetic team of 5 associates” Which of the two sounds better? Obviously, the latter. While describing your managerial and leadership skills, try to use words like prioritized, established, enforced, inspected, recommended, strengthened, tutored, enhanced, delegated, to infuse authority into your resume.
- Communication Skills: No matter what role you may be considering, effective communication skills will help you go a long way. When you use words like collaborated, consulted, arbitrated, communicated, debated, negotiated, convinced, discussed articulated, in your resume or CV, you convey the message that you believe in the power of team work.
- Research Skills: “I completed the project before time” or “I experimented with various possibilities and delivered the project in record time with proper analysis”. The latter clearly brings across the research skills of the applicant. Use of words like identified, extracted, interviewed, solved, examined, investigated, systematized, diagnosed, explored etc. must be used while speaking about your projects.
- Mentoring Skills: There is nothing more valuable than an employee who helps others to progress as well. With words like enabled, facilitated, motivated, coached, advised, evaluated, adapted, you can convince the employer that you can be one such to-go person for any problem.
- Organizational Skills: Accountability is a rare virtue that most employers value. “I spearheaded the preparations and supervised implementation at every possible level for unprecedented success”. This sentence highlights your qualities as an organizer. You may have successfully organized many programs in the past, but unless you learn the art of showing it in your resume your talents could go in vain.
