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.

Employers are interested in the value you can impart to their enterprise. As hard earned as your experience may be, they really don’t want to sort through your career looking for the nuggets they need to bring you in for an interview. There are typically so many applicants that they don’t have time to read anything that is not immediately pertinent to the position they are trying to fill.

Consider also, that typically the employing managers were not hired to screen and bring in new applicants as an end unto itself. They were hired to manage a team to accomplish something on behalf of the company. While they know that hiring the right people is very important, managers are still likely to regard the process as an administrative burden.

Your resume needs to cut to the chase and instill confidence from the get go. The employing managers would really like to get back to work with as much peace of mind as you can give them.

Let’s say we have an auto mechanic who excels at working on transmissions. He is applying to a job at the Mercedes dealership for a Transmission Specialist. Let’s consider the bullet points he could use to sell himself. First read the bullet points below in their entirety, then read them again. They do an adequate job of presenting his skills.

Transmission Specialist – Original Bullets

• Successfully repaired transmissions of domestic and foreign manufacturers.
• Generated additional business by calling customers with vehicles on recall and offering to do the repairs.
• Conducted training seminars on BMW transmissions to the local BMW Enthusiasts club.
• Received training from a wide range of vendors on the particulars of their products to include body repair, power train products to tire balancing.
• Repaired alternators for Range Rovers by learning to read complex wiring diagrams specific to Range Rovers.
• Completed all work within the allotted man-hour requirements of the company 97% of the time.
• Completed advanced transmission instruction at DeVry Technical College.

Now read the bullet points he is using now that he is using JobTabs.

Transmission Specialist – JobTabs Bullets

• Successfully repaired transmissions of Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen, and Audi among others.
• Participated in the fuel pump replacement recall for the Daimler 123SE.
• Conducted training seminars on BMW transmissions to the local BMW Enthusiasts club.
• Received training from Bosch on the specifics of clutch degradation and the materials manufactured by Bosch to prolong clutch life.
• Completed training from Heinrichs GMBH on the variations of transmission fluids and the considerations for using each type.
• Completed all work within the allotted man-hour requirements of the company 97% of the time.
• Completed instruction on the new Advanced Overdrive Technology pioneered by Daimler Chrysler in an advanced transmission training class at DeVry Technical College.

As an aside, the reference to Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen and Audi among others adds value of the mechanic’s experience. The nature of automobile manufacturing is very nepotistic in that manufacturers on each continent by and large procure from manufacturers on that continent. Just as US automakers procure from US manufacturers, the European automakers procure from each other, e.g. it is unlikely any of these manufacturers procure spark plugs from any other source other than Bosch.

The JobTabs bullets differ from the original resume on several considerations. The JobTabs bullets intimate the mechanic to the needs of the Mercedes automobile. While the mechanic is not misrepresenting himself on either resume, on the JobTabs resume he is clearly intimating himself to all things Mercedes and downplaying a connection to anything else. By doing so, he is much more likely to appear as a Mercedes transmission expert. Clearly gone is any reference to Range Rover wiring diagrams. Instead of generalizing the training he has received from vehicle suppliers, he clearly specifies the training he has received related to transmissions or from European suppliers. Even the advanced training class he took is skewed to the demands of his prospective employer.

One of the best articles I have ever read on the importance of tailoring your resume is,

Don’t Make Them Think! from the job-hunt.org web site.

Author Susan Joyce, admonishes job seekers to not make them remember as well.  I agree!

This job candidate has an edge. He has worked smarter – not harder. The organizational chaos that would usually result from this level of detail is nonexistent. If this job application doesn’t materialize, at the very least he certainly has a new arrow in his quiver with which he can use to easily qualify himself for new opportunities. To illustrate, if the Volkswagen dealership began canvassing for a new Transmission Specialist how many bullet points would need to be modified to make our applicant an ideal candidate? Only two,

• Participated in the fuel pump replacement recall for the Daimler 123SE.
• Completed instruction on the new Advanced Overdrive Technology pioneered by Daimler Chrysler in an advanced transmission training class at DeVry Technical College.

While the mechanic would have to draw from his experience with Volkswagen automobiles to intimate himself to the Volkswagen job requisition, even these two bullet points are not too far off from what Volkswagen might want.  As we have stated and will continue to state, the more you qualify yourself for new opportunities the easier it will be to qualify yourself for subsequent opportunities. At the risk of being very bold, the job search will actually be fun.

Creating a slew of resumes this specific and being able to readily gather and sell the gist of the resume, would normally be untenable without a tool. While anyone can start out extremely organized, eventually the labor of maintaining that level of oversight for a prolonged period is simply too taxing.  Invest in a tool to help you with your job search – the other people competing for the interview already have.