Almost every book or article on CV writing advises using active words, action verbs and avoiding the passive tense. But when you sit down and actually start writing, it’s hard to come up with such words for resume.
How do you choose the right words for a CV, and why is it so necessary?
If you want to write an effective CV, then make sure that it contains active words. A CV is your personal advertisement. Whether your strengths are leadership skills, people skills or creativity, you need to use the right language to make your CV active. If you want to get noticed, you need to make sure your CV has enough active words to make it stand out from the crowd.
So what are active words, and how are they used?
Active words are popular words that increase the competitiveness and attractiveness of a CV by making it sound special. In most cases, active words are action verbs or adjectives.
Active words can be used as keywords to search CV databases.
The style of CV writing tends to be different from that of job report writing. Action verbs are much more appropriate to describe achievements. Use them to describe the steps YOU have taken on the job, or to describe convincingly what you have achieved. Action verbs work well at the beginning of a bulleted list of achievements, and for describing skills and key skills. Use action verbs in the past tense – this gives the action a sense of something done or completed, reinforcing your achievements.
Active adjectives are most often used to describe your strengths and personality traits.
How do keywords in a CV help?
The first step is to make your own list of qualities that you possess, selecting your strongest among them and placing them at the top of the list. This makes it clearer what your strengths are and how well suited you are for the job you’re seeking.
The second thing you can do is to open a suitable vacancy and highlight all the qualities that are mentioned in the advertisement, and then write them in a separate list. These will be the keywords that the recruiter will be looking for in your CV.
Do not stop at one advertisement, it is better to look through several similar ones, and those qualities that will be mentioned in all of them are a kind of portrait of an ideal candidate for a position.
Among the resulting list of skills, you should identify those that are critical for the desired job, without the presence of which your candidacy will not even be considered. These skills should be brought forward so that the recruiter can see right away that you are the right fit.
The others are more general, but still useful. But they should also be specified, making it more specific: if your efforts have improved income or sales, specify that. If you have successfully resolved a problematic situation, do so too. Examples and figures show that the qualities you have listed are not just words.