Top 200 Most Powerful Resume Words (With Examples)

When you write a resume to sell your talents, every word counts. Overuse of clichés, meaningless phrases or unnecessary words can lead your resume to being trashed, even if you’re a great candidate for the job!

The worst and the best words to use

According to Forbes.com, top 3 words recruiters hate to see in your resume are: ‘best of breed’, ‘go-getter’ and ‘think outside the box’. But these are not only resume killers. Think about the action words you start the bullet points with. Most people overuse ‘responsible for’, ‘managed’ and ‘developed’ so much that the recruiter finds it impossible to get their point and reach their talents, achievements and potential.

As you see, when it comes to your resume, quality writing is everything. Poor writing along with excessive use of cookie-cutter phrases won’t gain you an interview.

Don’t know how to quality rewrite your resume and which words to use? Check our list of powerful resume words. These are the motivating, inspiring words making the reader interested and involved into what you’re writing – and hiring managers will be happy to see them on a resume. And, accordingly, they will maximize the punch your resume gives quite fast.

200 Powerful resume words

How to rewrite your resume using powerful resume words

Now, when you’ve got a list of working, high-impact resume words, it’s time to incorporate them in your resume. Here are a few example of how to turn weak statements into strong using words from the list.

Instead of:

Led sales team and increased sales

Try the following:

Supervised a sales team of 5 and boost sales by 25% annually

Instead of:

Trained staff and hired new team members

Write as goes below:

Authored and implemented a new training program and

Streamlined the hiring process which resulted in 14% revenue growth

Another poor example:

Responsible for negotiations with vendors

And good one:

Negotiated 3% discount for the next shipment with vendors

If your resume says:

Developed marketing strategy for the new company product

Make it sound like this:

Marketed new product through Facebook and increased sales by 22%

Why words matter?

As you see, simply putting the wrong action verb (or phrasal verb) at the beginning of your bullet points, you can dramatically reduce your chance for an interview call. So, if you caught yourself using weak verbs or overusing something like “managed”, it’s high time you reworked your resume. Now, as you have the list of strong resume words, let me show you how exactly these words will make your resume better.

• They show your real impact on business
  it’s much easier to say that you were ‘responsible for’ something. Still, these words demonstrate where you succeeded – and this is exactly what the HR manager wants to know.
• They let you stand out from the crowd
  not many candidates use variety of action verbs. No doubt that those who do are one step ahead and deserve far more attention
• They demonstrate your intelligence

While the HR hasn’t seen you in person, the resume sheet is your face. When your resume demonstrates a perfect writing style, the HR manager thinks about you as a worthy candidate.

It’s time to get started!

The word list above will help you take your resume to the next level. You can also consult All resume tips in one to fix other issues your resume might have.

Hesitant about how to make your resume better? Contact our resume writing specialist to ask for a free critique of your old resume to find out which aspects of your resume should be improved. It’s quick – usually takes less than 24 hours – and totally free of charge!