The Death of the Verb
You and I have both heard the typical line from career counselors, “use power verbs in your résumé .” Right? They’ve even given us lists and lists of verbs to begin sentences:
- Managed team of 10 engineers in highly competitive RFP process
- Resolved difficult customer service issue for high stakes sale
- Safeguarded company position through advanced marketing strategy
The problem with all of these verbs is that online, verbs are not as powerful as nouns.
Thanks to search engines, and by extension, résumé-crawling software that HR departments use to pre-filter candidates, using the right nouns can either get you a job or keep you in the unemployment line.
The New Rules of Résumé Language
I’m not suggesting that you pack in as many nouns related to your field as possible. Keep it real, and just change the focus from verbs to nouns.
Careful. If you take this too far, your online résumé might look like this:
Manager, team player and results-oriented marketing professional with 10 years experience managing, leading teams and running advertising for large companies that have managers and teams….
Make sure you write for people, but make sure to use the right combination of nouns. Too many nouns will get you red-flagged and discarded. Sentences that don’t make sense are also thrown out.
Where Do I Find My Nouns?
Because you are targeting specific jobs with specific companies, no one can give you a list. There are many tools to help you, but the best one comes directly from the company you are targeting!
Here are the steps I tell clients to grow their noun list:
- Collect 5-10 job postings from the company and/or position you are looking for (hmmm I guess Job Boards are good for one thing!)
- Highlight the nouns that seem to be recurring over and over again
- Jot down the nouns with the highest occurrences; make a list of 10.
Now you know what words to weave into your résumé for your target company.
I’ve had problems making verbs agree, anyways. If most verbs on a resume are past tense, and then you have some reflexives (ending in -ing), then the whole thing looks unpolished. Nouns are a great solution. Thanks, Josh!
Great advice Josh! Thanks!
Yours is great advice Joshua. Thanks!
Folks might helpful find the “word aggregation” ability of Wordle in collecting their key nouns from Job Postings.
Its at http://www.wordle.net & is REALLY easy to use by “cutting & pasting” the whole Posting into the Web-based tool with one click. How cool is that for eliminating a laborious job, eh?
Enjoy folks!
@GaryFPatton
http://is.gd/1DCOm
Good tip, and I Stumbled it for you, Joshua. You’re going a bit far in calling for the death of the verb – which is still more important on a written resume – but no question, good nouns are more likely to get you found online.
.-= Jacob Share´s last blog ..The One Thing Your Personal Brand Must Have to Work =-.
Thanks Jacob for your comment. Yes, “death of the verb” is a bit of a hyperbole, I agree with you that there needs to be a balance between verbs and nouns. We are now writing for both humans and robots. But I got your attention didn’t I 🙂
Good tip, and I Stumbled it for you, Joshua. You’re going a bit far in calling for the death of the verb – which is still more important on a written resume – but no question, good nouns are more likely to get you found online.
.-= Jacob Share´s last blog ..The One Thing Your Personal Brand Must Have to Work =-.
Thanks Jacob for your comment. Yes, “death of the verb” is a bit of a hyperbole, I agree with you that there needs to be a balance between verbs and nouns. We are now writing for both humans and robots. But I got your attention didn’t I 🙂