Top 70 Action Verbs to Upgrade your Resume and Stand Out

 

Employers are looking for people who are assets for their business. People who will not only do the job they are hired for, but also bring in some added value. They want people who will make things happen, so you’ll benefit by portraying yourself as someone who does just that, as someone who will succeed in the position you are applying for.

You will want to show a potential employer what you have accomplished – which implies that you are a doer – and to do that, you will need to help the HR talent acquisition employee scanning your resume visualize what you have done in your previous positions by painting a picture of what kind of employee you are.

How to use action verbs in a resume

In order to portray yourself as a person who gets things done, you’ll of course want to avoid presenting your various job positions in terms of job duties or responsibilities. So forget right away about copying and pasting your current and past job descriptions.

Instead, you’ll want to focus on presenting what you have accomplished during your tenure in any position. Action verbs should be sprinkled all over your cover letter and resume, in pretty much every section. Most importantly, you should also revisit and revamp your resume summary and use some well-chosen action verbs there too.

However, the prime location for action verbs is really in the sections where you describe and paint a picture of your accomplishments at your current and previous employments. Each accomplishment should be itemized as a bullet point and should start with an action verb. Let’s take a look at some examples:

• Promoted cross-selling opportunities and ensured alignment with relevant industry developments, events, campaigns and publications.
• Lead internal project team debriefs and collaborated on external client debriefs, gathering insights, analyzing results and following with recommendations and action items.
• Wrote and developed new insightful contents and created new presentation standards which became widely adopted across the business.
• Facilitated strategy sessions and key client accounts workshops and lead project team kick-off and subsequent meetings.
• Acted as an advisor and coach to senior executives for sales presentations as well as on business opportunities strategy.

 If you have a hard time writing your job accomplishments, I suggest you take a look at your job description, and for each element, ask yourself what you have done that might stand out, how you have done your job differently, what you brought to the job that nobody else has, what results you created.

Here is an example of a bullet point in a job description:

• Manage end-to-end execution of communication team deliverables.

Here is what your accomplishments might look like in your resume:

• Mobilized communication team, pulling on their individual strengths and talents, to consistently deliver high impact and insightful deliverables on time and on budget.

Doing things in this manner provides an employer with a clear picture of what you have done, and therefore what you may be able to do for them, but also how you do things. The how is really important, because that is what differentiates you from all the other people who can also manage end-to-end the execution of communication deliverables. The main difference between you and others is how you do what you do, it’s the traits, the adjectives, the adverbs and the action verbs that you use to describe what you have accomplished.

Top 70 action verbs for your resume

Accomplished

Acquired

Acted as

Advised

Allocated

Analyzed

Assisted

Coached

Collaborated

Conceived

Conceptualized

Conducted

Consolidated

Coordinated

Created

Decreased

Delivered

Demonstrated

Designed

Developed

Directed

Ensured

Established

Exceeded

Exceled

Facilitated

Fostered

Generated

Guided

Identified

Implemented

Improved

Increased

Initiated

Instructed

Known for

Launched

Lead

Managed

Maximized

Mobilized

Monitored

Motivated

Negotiated

Optimized

Organized

Overhauled

Oversaw

Planned

Prepared

Prioritized

Produced

Promoted

Provided

Quantified

Recognized for

Redesigned

Reduced

Refined

Renowned for

Resolved

Revised

Rewrote

Sought

Supervised

Trained

Updated

Upgraded

Validated

Wrote