"I'll be around for questions at lunchtime. Leverage me." That's an actual statement I heard with my own ears at a conference I attended in Boston last week. Leverage me? How would one do that, exactly? It made me wish I'd brought a Buzzword Bingo card in case they started throwing in paradigms and granulars and best of breeds. (If you've never heard of Buzzword Bingo, learn all about it here.) Fortunately, the rest of the talk was really informative and relatively free of corporate-speak, so I forgave the leverage infraction.
Anyway, that got me thinking about resume buzzwords, and I realized there ought to be a Resume Buzzword Bingo card, too. So just for fun, I took my idea to our in-house Graphic Designer Extraordinaire and asked him to turn my list of common resume terms and clichés into a bingo card.
Since he's an experienced, results-focused, detail-oriented team player with good computer skills and a proven track record of having a passion for out-of-the-box thinking, he quickly came up with this highly creative design in our fast-paced, deadline-driven environment:
Click to enlarge and print your own Resume Buzzword Bingo Card!
Job seekers can use the Resume Buzzword Bingo Card to check that their resumes aren't overloaded with hackneyed phrases and unproven claims.
HR people, recruiters, and hiring managers can use it to have some fun while sorting through stacks of resume submissions.
It's not that buzzwords are inherently evil; every resume will contain a few of them. But as a job seeker, you never want to become that guy, the one whose resume is so saturated with unproven claims that your readers could fill every square on their Bingo Cards twice over!
RELATED LINKS
If You Say it in the Resume, Prove it in the Interview
Take the 'Cupcakes' Out of Your Resume
Critique Your Resume Like a Hiring Manager
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