As a veteran recruiter and recruiting leader turned career coach, I have seen THOUSANDS of resumes over the past 25 years.  As a recruiter, one of the greatest highs you can get is to come across an awesome resume for a job you’re trying to fill – particularly for a hard-to-fill job!  After weeks and months of searching for the right candidate, you find him/her.  Yes!!! 

Then there’s the flip side – the piles of “eh” and “what were they thinking” resumes you receive day after day.  Of course, candidates are striving to do the best they can when applying for job.  Recruiters know candidates want to make a positive and lasting impression so they’ll be the one to get the call. But there’s one thing many candidates don’t know when it comes to resumes – you can have great experience and credentials, but if you use weak phrases to describe you and what you’ve done, you can still fall into the “eh” or “what were they thinking” category. 

In an article published by CareerBuilder for Robert Half International, they did a brilliant job of highlighting many of the phrases that recruiters find to be quite generic.  I encourage you to read this article, Words that hurt: 10 overused terms to remove from your resume, and then examine your resume to see if it needs to be “spiced” up a bit. 

Until next time….