Hi there, I'm Yulia Kosarenko.
In this video, I want to share a couple of resume tips with you.
I review a lot of resumes and coach professionals –
business analysts, architects and project managers on how to make their resumes stand out.
There is a lot you can do.
Resume structure, consistent format,
highlighting your most valuable skills close to the top,
and making your career objectives clear are all crucial.
But today, we will talk about one specific aspect - the words you use.
When I review a resume of someone who is applying for a business analyst position,
whether they are aspiring or seasoned professionals,
I pay close attention to how they use language and specific words.
The ability to express ideas and concepts clearly in writing
is a key competency for a business analyst.
You should apply the same diligence to crafting your resume
as you apply to crafting user stories and requirements documents.
That means being clear, factual, and specific.
What exactly does this mean? How do you apply this advice to your resume?
Being clear means making your statements easy to understand.
Don’t use convoluted, specialized and confusing language.
For example, don’t string too many nouns together like this:
Collaborated on the product sales dashboard improvement task force initiative -
too many nouns!
Your audience will quickly lose track.
They might simply ignore the sentence
if it’s too hard to extract useful information from the word structure you’ve used.
Can you say it more simply?
For example, “Created mock-ups for improved product sales dashboards”
or “defined requirements for enhancing product dashboards”.
The key information here is that you’ve worked with dashboards.
Even if your organization indeed used fancy terms such as “task force initiatives”,
it does not add more clarity to what you’ve already said.
Another example is abbreviations and company specific terms.
Those make your resume less clear. For example, you write:
“Supported the MRTC implementation for EDM LOB within MPI division to support the SPAC2021 strategy”.
This may make complete sense to you, but absolutely no sense to me.
Instead, I may hear: “supported something somewhere who knows what for
and I really have no idea what he did”.
So put yourself if the recruiter’s shoes.
They probably don’t care how your previous employer branded their new strategy,
or the exact name of the division.
They want to know what you can do,
and whether your skills and experience match what they are looking for.
To make it clear to the reader, use the words and terms
that your intended readers will understand, and if you must use an acronym, explain it.
Being factual means including the facts about your career rather than qualitative statements:
the projects you’ve worked on, accomplishments, tangible results.
Instead of just stating that you have experience in manufacturing industry,
indicate your employment,
and if the company you’ve worked for is not well known, you can mention the industry,
for example: “Junior business analyst, NTRX technologies (robotics)”
Avoid empty and pompous statements that do not contain any factual information.
Here are some examples.
Passionate about applying my strength to provide considerable value to the organization.
Committed to achieving peak job performance.
Fostered a collaborative team spirit across a diverse range of individuals
to evolve a high-functioning and dedicated dream team.
This really says nothing factual about what you did.
Instead, focus on the facts: for example, if you proposed a process improvement
that helped eliminate redundant steps or reduced customer wait time.
Or mention that you’ve organized business analysis huddles to share
best practices, glossaries, and business rules across projects.
Or perhaps you’ve volunteered for a social committee
and organized cultural events that helped you get to know team members from other countries
and improved your working relationships with them.
Finally, being specific means providing details
about your knowledge and experience and including examples.
You can mention specific projects, applications, departments you’ve worked with,
techniques you’ve used or deliverables you’ve produced.
Instead of saying: “Collaborated on multiple projects for best business results” say:
“Analysed and captured requirements for a new accounts payable tracking system”.
Instead of claiming: “Understood business processes and captured current state”,
specify that you “modelled current process flows, analyzed process bottlenecks
and captured business rules for key decisions”.
It’s easy to give advice, you might say,
but as you sit down to improve your resume, you may experience a writer’s block.
What exactly to say, and what to leave out?
In this video, I want to offer you a simple trick
that will help make your resume more clear, factual, and specific.
This tip is very simple:
cut down on adjectives and adverbs and use more verbs and nouns.
Each time you use a meaningful verb in your resume, you are telling me what you did.
Try to use specific and action-oriented keywords such as
developed, captured, created, documented, analyzed, proposed,
facilitated, tested, resolved, trained, designed or implemented.
Each time you use a meaningful noun,
you are showing your understanding of business objects, tools or deliverables.
Use nouns that represent important keywords in your area of experience:
tools, techniques, methods, deliverables, and business terms.
When you combine verbs with nouns,
you make your experience with various activities specific, for example:
Analyzed the customer churn problem.
Facilitated discovery workshops.
Created templates for capturing business scenarios.
Developed and presented storyboards.
On the other hands, when you pad your resume with adjectives and adverbs,
you don't really tell me anything new.
Let’s take this example:
“Extensive and versatile experience in requirements gathering”
Extensive and versatile are adjectives.
Qualitative adjectives are also very subjective.
Whenever you describe what you did as excellent, diligent, substantial,
efficient, creative, valuable, useful or forward-looking, it is only your opinion.
And it makes me wonder why you are using all these descriptors –
is it because you have not done anything specific that is worth including in you resume?
The same applies to adverbs.
You don’t need them to embellish your activities, such as:
Diligently captured business requirements, or
Expertly negotiated with customers.
Get rid of most adjectives and adverbs
and replace them with nouns that reflect a specific aspect of your experience.
Instead of “Extensive and versatile experience in requirements gathering” say:
“Experience conducting requirements workshops, capturing user story maps,
backlog planning facilitation and grooming the backlog.”
Now, not only you’ve listed specific techniques that you are familiar with,
you’ve crammed more useful keywords
that will make your resume more searchable in a recruitment database.
This brings me to another key message:
Verbs and nouns are useful keywords. Adverbs and adjectives are not.
When recruiters use search capabilities to search for resumes
in databases, websites and social media, they mostly rely on
nouns and verbs directly related to the job requirements.
It could be skills, methodologies, techniques, areas of knowledge,
positions, certifications or team roles.
They are very unlikely to search for words like “great”, “team player”,
“motivated”, “best”, “responsible” or “dynamic”.
So don’t waste you time and the space on your resume on the fillers and empty words.
Instead, research and brush up on the professional terminology in your line of work
and make your resume as informative as possible.
That’s it for today.
To recap, be clear, factual, and specific in every line of your resume.
Go through and question every adjective and adverb.
Does it provide any new, factual or specific information?
If not, get rid or it, and replace with action verbs and nouns.
Every word in your resume needs to be justified,
and you should be able to explain what you meant by each point in an interview.
Now go back to your resume and review it with a critical eye.
And best of success in your next career move!
I’m Yulia Kosarenko and you are watching the Why Change channel.
Until next time!