Words that should not be in your Curriculum Vitae/Resume.

These words are so common that you fiind them in literaly every CV and often have no real meaning. They are a result of the copy and paste phenomenon used by many of us especially when writing the first CV. Instead of using these words a job applicant is advised to use words which concretise the meaning and substance you intend to convey; facts and figures do a good job in this respect.

Words / phrases to avoid:

1. "Responsible for"

It is obvious, if you are or have been in employment, that you are or were responsible for something. Using numbers to quantify your accomplishments will take you a long way towards getting the interview. For example, instead of saying "I was responsible for achieving sales targets", try adding figures and making statements like "I achieved 110% of my sales target".

2. "Experienced"

Remember experience is subjective and meaningless without quantification. Instead of letting your employer to try and figure out how much of your experience is relevant for the current position on offer, it would put you in better light if you go ahead and give the specifics; for example, instead of saying "experience in credit recovery", try - "achieved a 75% recovery on more than 1 year old debts which the company was contemplating to write off as bad debts..."

3. "Excellent written communication skills"

It may be difficult for your potential employer to judge what you mean by excellent. Remember, excellence is subjective! Your idea of "excellent" might be very different from someone else's. Beef it up with facts and figures as these will then make your assessment objective. Instead of saying "I have excellent written communications skills", present it with your measure which somebody else can validate by saying, for exampel, "I wrote clear user documentation, which reduced customer service calls by 50%"

4. "Team Player"

Of course every job applicant will try to impress a potential player by claiming to be a team player! Here the purpose is to give the potential employer a vivid image of how a team player you are. Instead of putting it plainly that "I am a team player who works well in any group", make it vivid by adding real characters to show that you have really acted out the quality you are trying to portray. You can say, for example, that "In my previous role I worked with the sales director, on-site with customers, website designers to..."

5. "Detail oriented"

As you can see it does not make much sense if it is not supplemented with facts to support it. Instead of saying that "I am a detail oriented accountant" , try substantiating how your detail oriented benefited your employer; for example you can say "I reviewed the cost break down of our major processes and recommended elimination of some tasks altogether. This resulted in $122,000 savings over the year and for this i was rewarded..."

Hope this improves your CV/Resume writing. To read more articles about how to improve your CV/Resume writing skills you need to first register/signup (if not already registered) and then follow the CV Writing Tips menu.