With so much corporate jargon and large corporations using “Yogababble“It’s easy to fall into the traps of LinkedIn influencers and the like – especially when you’re writing a resume or cover letter.
If enough people with apparent credibility are using lively idioms, a young professional might consider peppering their résumés and cover letters with the same language. The truth, however, is that you will sound better informed without branding yourself as “adept at marketing campaigns with high agility” or as an “insight leader looking to scale data-driven startups.”
But first, it helps to understand what keywords are and how they easily fit into your application documents.
What are catchwords?
There are some buzzwords that only get this way because they are overused – not because they are necessarily meaningless. In business parlance, you are likely familiar with some aspect of a company’s business operations as an “ecosystem” or its obsession with “impact points” and continuous “touch points”. These terms are not necessarily useless, although the working world is saturated with them. This is why you should try removing corporate language from your vocabulary in order to sound more human.
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“The goal of a résumé is to ask you interview requests. You want the person reading it to feel like there is a real person on the other side of the resume, not a faceless drone, ”says Marc Cenedella Founder of Leet Resumessays Lifehacker. “It’s important to write sentences that sound like a real person.”
The roughest example of buzzwords is when the words used in corporate environments have little meaning. These terms are used to position whoever uses them as a self-proclaimed expert or an industry insider who is familiar with the language that only a few highly trained specialists can employ.
Courtesy of Indeed, here are ten revised terms that easily penetrate the field of buzzwords:
- Return on investment
- synergy
- Customer journey
- Deep dive
- A hit
- Ballpark
- Core competency
- Visibility
- Start up
- sustainability
There is far, far more beyond thatFor this reason, it is good to understand what will appear when you use these terms and how to replace them with better, more reliable, and more direct language. Without the hollow rhetoric, you appear more human.
This is how you replace keywords with more meaningful language
Many candidates – especially the greener ones, perhaps fresh from a business program – often forget that they are not only marketing their skills, but themselves as people who are personable and relatable. As Cenedella puts it, there are any number of reasonable synonyms to replace the revised and clichéd prose you might use in a cover letter.
He writes:
Don’t say, “I was hired to synergize cross-company content collateral to optimize our consumer growth matrix” when you mean, “You hired me to rock our social media and I succeeded.”
Basically, you want to strive for simplicity. Cenedella is driving this house forward with a good example: “A good rule of thumb is: If you weren’t going to talk to colleagues about beer like that, you shouldn’t write it like that on your résumé.” do, but don’t overdo yourself with an exuberant sucker.
Most importantly, You are not a brandSo there is no need to present yourself as one person or adhere to the catchphrase blueprint used by certain people and companies. If you clean up all the jargon and speak honestly about your strengths and achievements, you will be ready for success.
