Michael Faulkner - Power Verbs for Job Seekers: Hundreds of Verbs and Phrases to Bring Your Resumes, Cover Letters, and Job Interviews to Life

Hundreds of Verbs and Phrases to Bring Your Rsums, Cover Letters, and Job Interviews to Life

Michael Lawrence Faulkner
with Michelle Faulkner-Lunsford

Vice President, Publisher: Tim Moore
Associate Publisher and Director of Marketing: Amy Neidlinger
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2013 by Michael Lawrence Faulkner
Publishing as FT Press
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

FT Press offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information, please contact U.S. Corporate and Government Sales, 1-800-382-3419, .

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing February 2013

ISBN-10: 0-13-315872-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-315872-4

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faulkner, Michael.
Power verbs for job seekers : hundreds of verbs and phrases to bring
your rsums, cover letters, and job interviews to life / Michael
Faulkner. 1 Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-13-315872-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Rsums (Employment) 2. Cover letters. 3. Job hunting. 4.
English languageVerb. 5. English languageVerb phrase. I. Title.
HF5383.F38 2013
650.14dc23
2012050097

Dedicated to Ken Boyer, the gatekeeper.

Ken was my first college professor and had a powerful
influence on the direction of my life.

There were many people who helped with this book in many ways. Much of this help was a family affair. My wife Jo-Ann lent her love, patience, support, and advice. My son Kenny provided ideas for format when I was at a dead end. My grandsons Andrew and Alex helped by looking up some words, and my daughter Michelle did yeomans work: performing edits, writing content, working on style, and giving advice.

Dr. Michael Lawrence Faulkner is the author of six books. He is a Professor at the Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University. He is a former U.S. Marine, who spent 30 years in a variety of leadership and executive management positions with Fortune 500 firms and major nonprofit trade associations, as well as helping run the family business before beginning his second career in academics. Michael is a member of MENSA, a Rotary International Fellow, the Keller Master Teacher Award, and holds a Silver Certification by the Toastmasters International. In addition to his Ph.D., Michael has earned two Masters degrees, one from NYU and an MBA from NYIT.

Michelle Faulkner-Lunsford is a 2001 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, where she majored in English and minored in Writing. Mrs. Lunsford spent 10+ years in the world of advertising and marketing as an Account Manager and Director of Marketing and New Business Development, managing multi-million dollar accounts ranging from male enhancement medications to beer ads. In 2011, Michelle left the corporate world for the opportunity to raise her daughter.

The power verbs in this book are those that can be used for job searching and networking. They are arranged alphabetically under major and minor categories of the most desirable and sought-after human values, personality traits, personal characteristics, behaviors, and employability skills. There has been substantial empirical research done on the topic of what employers are really looking for in applicants. The results of these studieswhat employers really seek in job applicantswere used to provide the framework for what power verbs to include and how to best organize them for readers.

The authors have included hundreds of the most useful power verbs as part of the practical implicit approach to employers and networking contacts. Job searchers can pump up their rsums, cover letters, thank-you notes, interviews, and other forms of human communications that are critical to job searching. In addition, individuals who want to enhance their personal, social, and business lives by building a powerful network can enhance their networking skills.

Those of you searching for attention-grabbing, highly impactful power verbs should think about the kinds of critical employability skills and the most desirable employability and personality skills by broad topics (for example: accomplishments and achievements, communication skills, ability to work with teams, and ability to find and fix problems). Once youve determined these broad categories of skills and traits, you can search alphabetically to refine the hunt for just the right power verbs. To help you find all possible power verbs, cross-check words in the index.

The power verbs that are not in common use have international pronunciation included.

Each power verb has synonyms and abbreviated definitions to help you position just the right power verbs for the impact and effect you desire.

In most cases, the power verbs include examples of the specific word in actual use as a Rsum bullet point. Bulleted points have a style purpose that says, Something important follows. Employment experts have recognized for some time that smartly bulleted rsum points are the most effective, efficient, and productive method for job seekers to display their value to a prospective employer. The problem is that good people have had exciting, responsible jobs and have accomplished significant achievements in their work and social lives, but fail to correctly display these achievements in bullet form. While many employ the bullet model, they have two fundamental but deadly flaws. First, rsums frequently include too many bullet points. Second, many of the bullets included were somewhat dull narrations repeating, in synonyms, job descriptions that have already been indicated.

Rsum bullet points should draw attention to your accomplishmentsyour quantitative selling points. Rsum bullet points depict achievements and should not just restate the job description. An achievement is anything that can be measured in numbers, dollars, percentages, or some measure showing improvement due to some action, attainment, decision, deed, endeavor, exploit, feat, step, success, undertaking, venture, or work attributed to you.

Hiring managers are busy people and appreciate applicants who respect their time by providing a few (3 to 4) simple, easy-to-read, yet impactful bullets of their achievements for each position. Note that we said achievements; we did not say restatements of their job description. Your rsum is a form of an extended calling card, and its purpose is to get you a face-to-face interview, not tell your entire working history.

Some power verbs include a field titled Collocates to. This is a listing of primarily less familiar words that includes other terms that have a tendency to be grouped or chunked together with that verb.