Excessive Use of Action Verbs

Does Excess Use of Action Verbs in Resume helps in Getting Job

Resumes are the influential tool for job seekers as they highlight your skills and abilities to the potential employer. It explains what you can do for the potential employer so that they can hire you. You should write an informative, appealing and powerful resume to get noticed by the employer. Resume is generally the list of your achievements, attributes and skills that will relate to any future position. You should be expressive in your education and experience using the action verbs as keywords. Action words are used to present your job activities and grab the attention of the employer. The below article explains you the effect of excess use of action verbs in resume.

The action verbs in resume are used to describe the job duties that you handled during your past jobs. Including these action words in resume will easily highlight your skills and responsibilities and convince the employer to call you for the interview. You should be able to present your developed skills and abilities acquired during the previous employments in your resume in effective way. These skills can be obtained from your work environment, hobbies, education, classes, etc. Choosing the accurate action verb is important and you should use the one that will correctly highlight your work abilities. Following is the list of the commonly used action verbs in resume description.

Accomplished, Achieved, Budgeted, Campaigned, Collaborated, Cultivated, Delegated, Demonstrated, Focused, Identified, Obtained, Navigate, Listen, Allocate, Design, Stimulate, Adapt, Validate, Illustrate, Expedite, Conceptualize, Influence, Change, Identify, Convey, Institute, Conceive, Retain, Amplify, Solve, Confer, Initiated, Mentor Centralize, Simplify, Negotiate, etc.

Effect of Using Excessive Action Words in Resume:

Although it is recommended to make use of the action words in your resume details to highlight your skills and job roles, making excess use of these words will make your resume boring and ineffective.
Instead of describing yourself using the words like "team-player" or "self-motivated", specify this quality by describing an occasion where you demonstrated that particular characteristic.
Using the action words like monitored, prepared, managed, championed, developed, and presented will cause your resume to stand-out. You should avoid using the same words again and again. Using the same action verbs repeatedly many times will make the employer to think of your limited set of keywords and may reject your application.
Use of keywords in resume will definitely help in getting jobs but using the keywords excessively will affect the quality of your resume and set you back in the race.
The words can not only highlight you but also discard you from the process. It is important for you to show how active you are and how involved you were in your previous jobs. For this reason you should avoid using the words like "assisted" or "supported" which implies that you were on sidelines.
You should also avoid using the words that will make it look like you really didn't do much in particular achievement for example, "involved with".

The effect of excess use of action verbs in resume will be bad as it affects the quality of resume. However, writing different action words according to the requirement of the employer and job demands will help you get short listed in automatic database short listing system.