The 28 to cut first

Claims about your character (23)

These describe an internal state only you can verify, so a reader discounts all of them equally and everyone writes them. The fix is never a stronger adjective. It is deleting the adjective and putting the evidence in its place, which is usually a number you already have and have not gone to find.

• Detail-orientedTraits and self-descriptionThat you are careful and catch mistakes.Instead: Processed about 1,100 claims a quarter at a 99.7% accuracy rate, and caught a duplicate-payment error worth $46k before it left the system.
• DynamicTraits and self-descriptionThat you are energetic and adaptable.Instead: Covered support, onboarding and billing operations at a 9-person company for two years, then handed each to a specialist as we hired.
• Excellent communicatorTraits and self-descriptionThat you write and speak well.Instead: Wrote the onboarding documentation now used by every new engineer, and ran the monthly internal talk series for two years, averaging 60 attendees.
• Fast learnerTraits and self-descriptionThat you pick things up quickly.Instead: Joined with no Go experience and shipped the rate-limiter to production in my seventh week, against a normal ramp of three months.
• Go-getterTraits and self-descriptionThat you act without being pushed.Instead: Noticed we had no way to see refund reasons, built the tagging myself over two weekends, and it now drives the quarterly product review.
• Go-to personTraits and self-descriptionThat colleagues came to you when they were stuck.Instead: Handled most of the team questions on our billing integration, then wrote the guide that replaced them; questions dropped to roughly one a month.
• Hard workerTraits and self-descriptionThat you will put in effort.Instead: Covered a vacant territory alongside my own for seven months, and both regions finished the year above quota.
• MeticulousTraits and self-descriptionThat you work with unusual care.Instead: Prepared 200-plus statutory filings across three years with no late submissions and no restatements, and the last two external audits raised nothing.
• MotivatedTraits and self-descriptionThat you want to do the work.Instead: Studied for the AWS associate certification across six months of evenings while working full time, and used it to take over our deployment pipeline.
• MultitaskedTraits and self-descriptionThat you handled several things at once.Instead: Ran 6 client accounts concurrently, each on its own release cycle, with no missed delivery date across 18 months.
• ProactiveTraits and self-descriptionThat you act before you are asked, or before a problem arrives.Instead: Flagged that our certificate renewals were manual and undated, then automated them; the previous year had included a 40-minute outage from an expired cert.
• Problem solverTraits and self-descriptionThat you work out how to fix things.Instead: Worked out why 8% of weekend orders were duplicating: a retry that fired on a slow response rather than a failed one. Fixed it and duplicates went to zero.
• Proven track recordTraits and self-descriptionThat you have consistently delivered before.Instead: Delivered six regulatory programs over four years, five on the original date and one three weeks late after a scope change we agreed with the regulator.
• PunctualTraits and self-descriptionThat you arrive on time.Instead: Worked 4am starts on a fixed rota for two years with 99% attendance, and covered 30-plus additional shifts at short notice.
• ReliableTraits and self-descriptionThat people can depend on you.Instead: Ran month-end close for 31 consecutive months without a late submission, including two months covering the role single-handed.
• Results-orientedTraits and self-descriptionThat you focus on outcomes rather than activity.Instead: Finished above quota in nine of eleven quarters, and closed the largest new-logo deal in the region in 2025 at $340k.
• Self-motivatedTraits and self-descriptionThat you work without supervision.Instead: Worked remotely as the only analyst in my time zone; set up the reporting rota myself and closed every month on time for two years.
• Self-starterTraits and self-descriptionThat you do not need to be told what to do.Instead: Only engineer in the European time zone for 14 months; ran the morning release alone and escalated to the US team twice in that period.
• Strong work ethicTraits and self-descriptionThat you work hard and take the work seriously.Instead: Carried a caseload of about 40 against a team average of 28 for a year, and my file-accuracy score stayed the highest on the team.
• SynergyTraits and self-descriptionThat combining two things produced more than the sum.Instead: Put one shared pipeline number in front of both sales and marketing weekly; disputed lead attribution dropped from a standing agenda item to nothing within a quarter.
• Team playerTraits and self-descriptionThat you work well with other people.Instead: Ran the Friday handover between our team and the overnight shift for two years, which took repeat escalations from about eight a month to one.
• Think outside the boxTraits and self-descriptionThat you approach problems unconventionally.Instead: Cut translation costs by shipping the app in English first and paying users in three markets to submit corrections; two of those communities still maintain their own strings.
• Wear many hatsTraits and self-descriptionThat you covered several roles at once.Instead: Employee number four: owned infrastructure, ran the on-call rota, and did first-line support until we hired a support lead in year two.

Phrases standing in for a verb (5)

These are not weak words. They are the absence of a word, wearing one as a coat: each marks a place where the sentence stopped before it said what you did. The fix is to finish the sentence, which is why the replacement is never a synonym.

• Duties includedOwnership and dutiesThat the following list was the scope of the role.Instead: Cleared a 200-email support backlog to same-day response and kept it there for eleven months, while processing about 60 returns a week.
• Familiar withTools and skillsThat you have some exposure to a tool or subject.Instead: Containerized three internal services with Docker and ran them on a shared Kubernetes cluster in staging.
• InnovatedBuilding and makingThat what you made was genuinely new.Instead: Built the first churn-risk score at the company from support-ticket sentiment, which now triggers the save-offer workflow and recovers about 30 accounts a quarter.
• Involved inContributionThat you were part of something.Instead: Ran the beta program for the mobile app launch: recruited 250 testers, triaged 400 reports, and cut the crash rate 60% before general release.
• VariousTraits and self-descriptionThat there were several of something, without saying how many.Instead: Supported three departments, mostly finance, and produced the month-end pack for a committee of nine.

How to find the rest of them yourself

No list can be complete, and a longer one would not help. Use the test instead: take any line and ask whether a colleague who did the same job could have written it word for word. If they could, it is describing the role rather than you, and it is costing you the space it occupies. Then ask whether you can follow the verb with a number and a consequence. If you cannot, the problem is usually that the number exists and you have not gone to look for it.

The other 97 words we have written about are not on this page on purpose. They are words worth keeping in the right place, and the pages say where that is.

Keep going

• All 125 résumé wordsIncluding the ones worth keeping, and where they belong.
• 7 résumé sectionsWhether a whole section belongs, not just a word.
• Résumé power verbsOnce the padding is gone, the verbs grouped by what each one claims.