Resume words that beat the tired ones

Why the words on your resume decide whether you get read

A recruiter spends seconds on a first pass, and an applicant tracking system reads your resume before they do — more than 90% of employers use software to filter or rank candidates (Harvard Business School, 2021). In both passes, the verbs and adjectivesyou choose do a lot of the work. The problem: the most common ones are on nearly every resume, so they've stopped meaning anything.

Two patterns quietly drain your bullets. The first is weak action verbs— "managed", "helped", "worked on", "responsible for". They describe presence, not impact, and they're so generic that a keyword search rarely rewards them. The fix is a sharper verb that names what you actually did ("directed", "rebuilt", "negotiated") paired with a number. The second is empty adjectives— "detail-oriented", "hardworking", "team player". These are claims, not evidence; everyone writes them, so recruiters discount them. The strongest move isn't a fancier adjective — it's replacing the claim with a result that proves it.

That's what every page below gives you: for each overused word, a list of stronger alternatives with a note on when to use each, plus before/after bullet rewrites that swap the tired word for a specific, quantified one. Pick the word you keep leaning on, grab a better one, and rewrite the bullet around a real outcome. Then run the whole resume through the free ATS checker to confirm it still parses and matches the job — nothing is uploaded.