JobTabs Job Search & Resume

Action verbs are a key form of salesmanship. You need look no farther than your workshop, pantry or under your kitchen sink to find clear examples.

• Pick up a can of WD-40®, a common household lubricant, and you will read, “Stops Squeaks”, “Protects Metal”, “Loosens Rusted Parts”, and “Frees Sticky Mechanisms”.
• Pick up a box of Ziploc® sandwich bags and you will read, “Keep your sandwich fresh by…”, “Use sandwich bags to decorate cakes. Fill the bag with icing…”, and “Fill sandwich bags with….”
• Pick up almost anything under the kitchen sink and you will read, “Cleans, Disinfects, Polishes, Shines”.

While these products have little to do with each other they all have one thing in common. They define their qualities with proactive verbs at the beginning of the sentence. These are facets of salesmanship that are all around us yet they are so subtle we rarely take notice. JobTabs makes it easy for you to leverage this same form of salesmanship in your resume to convey yourself as a can do candidate.

The JobTabs word processor provides an action verb dialog, shown to the left, which lists powerful action verbs that can put your resume in overdrive. The verbs, with very little duplication, are grouped by nine cross-disciplinary categories which are,

Communication Skills

Creative Skills

Financial Skills

Helping Skills

Management/Leadership Skills

Organizational Skills

Research Skills

Teaching Skills

Technical Skills

What makes this collection of verbs so special is that they are ideally suited to resumes. Specifically, they are proactive, positive verbs that can easily be understood. What’s more is the verbs can be used across many disciplines. For example, just because you are in the financial services industry doesn’t mean that you have to confine your choice of verbs to the Financial Skills category. No doubt there were times when you had to help others, be creative, or use your analytical skills to solve a technical problem. You can pull action verbs from the respective categories to help you qualify your accomplishments.

For what its worth, we were surprised by the appalling quality of action verbs offered by competing products on the web. They offered a large number of verbs, but didn’t seem to have done anything to make sure they were resume grade, top quality verbs.  For example, one product offered “Abandoned” in their list of action verbs. What proactive, can-do person would ever abandon anything? A proactive, can-do person would have,

• “Optimized resources which increased profitability by 8%.”
• “Reprioritized projects to maximize productivity, by…”

Optimizing and reprioritizing imply that something had to put in the back seat or possibly abandoned altogether, but you would never openly state that you abandoned anything. Always apply discretion to anything you put on your resume or seek the guidance of someone who can help you.