Polishing your IT Resume and LinkedIn Profile– Language, Part 2
Last time we talked about how cleaning up the language in your Resume and LinkedIn profile will help to attract IT staffing firms and IT recruiters. In particular, we looked at avoiding using clichés to describe yourself (because they usually mean nothing to IT staffing agencies and waste valuable space on your resume or profile). This time, we’ll focus on another way you can waste space with language and bore technical recruiters and IT recruiting companies: telling stories.
The best resumes, the ones IT recruiting firms are excited to submit to their clients, are the ones that succinctly display excellent skills and experience. Resumes or LinkedIn profiles that ramble on, include long first person sentences, and contain full, detailed paragraphs, are the last thing IT staffing companies want to submit to their clients.
If your resume or LinkedIn profile looks like this, how can you fix it? Start by breaking up your paragraphs into bullets. Each bullet should contain a single idea, like “I’m skilled at these programming languages: C# and Java.” Now remove the any first person references and any excessive words. Boil each bullet down to the simplest phrase you can. For instance, “Skilled programmer in Java and C#.” Repeat this process throughout your whole resume or profile until you have the sleekest, shortest version you can present to IT recruiting agencies. This will win you far more attention from technical recruiters—and IT jobs!
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Polishing your IT Resume and LinkedIn Profile – Language, Part 1
If you’re currently updating your resume and/or LinkedIn profile, you’re probably trying to find ways to make it more attractive to IT recruiters and IT staffing firms. While IT staffing agencies are usually drawn to the content of a resume or LinkedIn profile, it’s worth it to try to make sure it’s the most polished version that you can present. There’s a lot you can do to make your LinkedIn profile more attractive to IT recruiting companies, but today we’ll focus on the words you use to describe yourself.
Probably the trickiest part of making a resume or LinkedIn profile that really garners interest from IT staffing companies is making it stand out. It’s easy to write a resume that technical recruiters feel like they’ve seen a hundred times already. A powerful way to differentiate yourself to IT recruiting agencies is to make sure you skip using all the buzz words and phrases that everyone else uses – particularly in describing yourself. You probably already have an idea of what some of these words and phrases are, but we’ll post a list below. It may seem like a great idea to call yourself ‘passionate’ or a ‘team player’—you may actually even be these things! The problem is that these words are so overused, they’re useless. If you list yourself as ‘creative’ all you’re doing is wasting precious space on your resume or LinkedIn profile and boring IT recruiting firms. Focus on listing your skills and accomplishments. This is what they care about most.
Avoid these words on your resume or LinkedIn Profile:
Creative
Motivated
Passionate
Expert
Team-Player
Quick Learner
Collaborative
Hard-working
Driven
Want to see our open IT jobs? Follow us on LinkedIn. We post new jobs daily!