My boss told me to stop using so many buzzwords in my cover letters and it actually helped

I was applying for a marketing coordinator job in Austin last spring and kept using words like synergistic and optimize in everything. My old manager from my first job read one and said dude just talk like a normal person about what you actually did. So I rewrote it describing a specific social media campaign where I boosted engagement by 18% over 6 weeks. Has anyone else had someone call them out on their writing style and had it work out better?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_harper1mo ago

That boss did you a solid, honestly. Its so easy to fall into that corporate speak trap without even realizing you're doing it. A few years back I was helping a friend rewrite her resume for a graphic design role and she had "leveraged cross-functional synergies to optimize deliverables" in there. I was like, what does that even mean? She changed it to "worked with the sales team to make our product images load faster" and got an interview the next week. Something about just saying what you actually did cuts through all the noise.

miller.emery1mo ago

That's a great point, cutting through the fluff really does work.

ruby_henderson361mo ago

Yeah the "leveraged cross-functional synergies" thing is exactly what I used to write too. I had a friend tell me my resume sounded like a robot made it and once I started talking like a real person about actual results I got way more callbacks. What kind of stuff did you end up changing?