Recruiters want to skim our resume within a minute. Summaries must sit within 200 characters. Making space for the important stuff never felt more important — and some decisive edits can help.

Make the Important Words Fit.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Mark Twain, the American writer, publisher, and lecturer may have smiled knowing his brief, but lovely quote still helps us today as the bright and restless seek work amidst many other high-achieving job-seekers.

If you’ve reworked your resume recently via Resume IO, Canva, or (my favorite platform: My Perfect Resume.com) you’ll see the creative challenge in describing our work efforts, skills, and triumphs within a few words. The summary section on Resume IO rations a cruel 200 characters. The work experience for each role? Three bullets, each worth 200 characters each. (That’s about 4 well-margined lines per role.) One recruiter told me they want to read a resume within one minute. Doable for the author? I say so.

But how? We get creative. Stay open. And we trust that less becomes more. We know that the résumé’s a vessel to whet the readers’ appetite. We also learn how to remove the superfluous and retain the substance. Like one dear software developer explained our process as we refined his resume: we find the truth; remove the fluff, and then make the important stuff fit.

That’s what we’re here to co-discover this week: ten quick editing tips to cull your word count and make the important words fit. (I’ve narrated this article in this week’s Sage Sayers podcast. Do listen along, and share with anyone needing the help.)

Edit One

Minimize your adverbs. As a starting-out reporter, the biggest trim my editors made to my words included adverbs like “really,” “truly,” “additionally,” “surprisingly,” and a favorite of many “currently.” While adverbs help us emphasize key ideas and provide vocal variety in the spoken word, in the written word, we can remove with no or little impact to the meaning. A short example illustrates:

• Successfully launched a new sales process with $10M USD impact (10 words) vs. Launched a new $10M USD sales process. (7 words)

My point: If you launched the process with $10M USD impact, you succeeded. Successfully becomes redundant.

Edit Two

Replace “as well as” with “and.” “As well as” becomes superfluous phrasing adding no value. ‘And’ (or a slash) does just as well, and saves words.

Edit Three

Replace “on a weekly basis,” or, “on a regular basis,” with weekly or regularly/often for a satisfying four vs. one word cut.

Edit Four

Compress “I am able to,” “we are able to,” “they are able to,” to: “I can,” “we can,” or, “they can.” (Four words vs. two words.) Listen to two quick examples:

• “Able to execute deliverables,” becomes “execute deliverables.”
• “Able to deliver results” can become “delivers results.” (Although I do recommend specifying the results with profits or savings — or whatever resulted or results with you at the helm. )

Edit Five

Remove: “that.” (Hilarious, right?) Go through your resume (or anything you’ve recently penned) and cut “that.” In most cases, you do not change the meaning without this useless word. Two examples:

• I told him that I wanted a new manager, or else… vs. “I told him I wanted a new manager, or else.” (11 words vs. 10)
• “The problem with that new hire is that they lack motivation,” vs. “The new hire’s problem: lack of motivation,” or, “The new hire’s unmotivated. We’ve a problem.” (11 words vs. 7)

Edit Six

Make passive voice active for a more confident tone and fewer words. (I write on how to spot and correct passive voice in this article.) A few examples show this power.

• “Recommended by the COO for the promotion,” vs. “The COO promoted me.” (7 vs 4 words) (And with this edit, you now have space for the timeframe and what you promoted to. E.G. “The COO promoted me to X within Y months.”)
• “Nominated by the team as the most empathetic team lead,” vs. Team nominated me: “most empathetic leader.” (8 vs 6 words.)

Edit Seven

Replace camouflaged or fake verbs with real ones for a conversational tone and fewer words. This earlier article helps guide you to turning around this popular business communications pattern. Some real-world examples illustrate.

• “I improved my team’s performance through the enablement of open discussion and providing solutions.” (14 words)

I inserted four popular camouflaged verbs: performance, enablement, discussion, and my least favorite: solutions. What did you notice about the sentence? To me, this framework sounds vague, ubiquitous, and unsubstantial. To turn things around, you can:

• Make “performance” “perform”
• Tell us how you led or what or who you enabled in that moment
• Tell us what you solved

With the extra space, offer something insightful, like boost in morale; or that you retained, uplifted, boosted, or supported a team vs. despaired or demoralized or traumatized them. One potential edit which maintains the word count but sounds more concrete:

• “Coached my struggling team to better perform through caring, listening, and understanding their goals.” (14 words)
• Pioneered the development of dashboards can become: pioneered/developed dashboards. (Development’s your camouflaged verb and we save one word with this edit, while sounding more conversational vs. formal.)
• Led the integration of, can become “integrated.” (Four words vs. one.)

My preferred edit and our opportunity: Use less corporate-y sounding language. Enabling’s really helping, no? Solving’s ok; but, how and what did you solve? Reflect on your team’s struggles. Discover what changed or improved under your leadership and care. Then, tell us.

Edit Eight

Find and track your favorite wordy phrases and kill them. I’ve written for consumer news audiences for 30-years and edited the writing of business leaders and students for the same. I still find repeated wordy phrases in my writing. My job in my final proof? Eradicate any lingering weeds. A few of mine I’ve removed from this essay alone include:

• Arm ourselves with knowledge on vs. learn.
• Serves us well vs. helps

Edit Nine

I’ve shared eight edits so far to make our words crisp; what about the space itself? My last two edits do just that — liberating your resume from 3 pages to 1.5 with decisive, bold pruning.

First, find the repeated skills throughout each job description. Edit this list to 8–10 and add to the skills section (which on Resume IO and Canva sit in handy columns vs the body). Yank those references from your jobs section.

Highlight leadership skills like emotional intelligence, active listening, empowering, mentoring, and coaching. (This one cut organizes and compresses the message. You help your reader skim, find space for vital context and specifics, and help any bot find your resume within the pile. )

Edit Ten

Contain lists to three items. Ditch the rest. I’ve noticed job seekers adding five or more descriptors, verbs, or qualifiers to what they do. Resist. You’re straining your readers. Think of an over-packed suitcase. We risk penalty for exceeding the weight constraint and discomfort and body harm from carting the beast on our trip. Help vs. hinder our poor readers by offering a three-item range vs. a complete list of what we think they must know.

Having coached many job seekers already this quarter — and having reinvented and looked for many jobs myself — I know compressing our life’s work into 1.5 or fewer pages induces worry and panic. We fear we may leave something vital out, be ignored, or miss out. Dear listeners and readers: I hear you. I see you.

But think less about us and more about our audience. Trust our words mean more when we prune bramble and weeds around them. Know we sound confident and joyous when we speak the truth. Through this 10-edit list, I hope you see, just like packing a suitcase for an overseas trip, maintaining the weight limit takes effort; but, it sure satisfies once done.

Debbi Gardiner McCullough coaches and trains foreign-born leaders to become more confident, concise, and mentally fit communicators. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and coaches worldwide with BetterUp.