Resume Action Verbs: 16 Powerful Alternatives to ‘Accomplished’

Creating an outstanding resume that gets you to the interview stage is an art and science.

Knowing what to include is science and how to articulate it well to capture recruiter’s attention is where the art comes in.

It’s always better to replace weak and passive words with action verbs to show your achievements. Action words are strong and add personality to your resume. They are specific, have a positive tone, and portray you as someone who is confident.

And who won’t like to make that first impression? Here we’ve listed 16 alternatives to accomplish or accomplished that you can use in your resume to make it more powerful:

1. Achieved
2. Surpassed
3. Drove
4. Established
5. Capitalized
6. Spearheaded
7. Deciphered
8. Exceeded
9. Discerned
10. Enacted
11. Sparked
12. Sharpened
13. Shattered
14. Steered
15. Stimulated
16. Supervised

Here’s how you can use some of these action verbs in your resume:

Achieved: I achieved my monthly targets consistently for 3 years as a sales executive in xyz company.

Surpassed: Surpassed established department productivity goals by 23%.

Spearheaded: I spearheaded a team of 12 engineers to deliver the abc project well within the deadline.

Supervised: Supervised a team of nine content writers to deliver the monthly targets of xx blogs.

Exceeded: Exceeded expectation by delivering traffic growth of 93% YoY instead of the target of 85%.

Steered: I single-handedly steered the branch to profit by winning customers that we had lost.

Drove: Drove 37% increase in sales from the top 10 accounts by consistently following up and timely handling of customer queries.

Capitalized: I capitalized on analytics to make data-driven decisions that led to a 15% growth in sales.

You cannot go wrong with these action verbs when you qualify these with something concrete.

You may have noticed; we’ve backed these action words with data.

For example, exceeded expectation is vague if you are not mentioning the quantity or quality you exceeded.

Similarly, drove, spearheaded, surpassed and achieved among others are very powerful words but without quantifying they are just words that show promise. With numbers and data, they demand attention.

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