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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!