The 2026 Resume Buzzword Report: What Our AI Sees Most Often (Category-by-Category)

We built the Buzzword Density Score — a 0-to-100 measure of how much corporate fluff is hiding in a resume — because we kept noticing the same handful of phrases across resumes from wildly different candidates. Since launching it, we've watched thousands of resumes get scored, and the patterns are more predictable than we expected.

This post is what we've seen. Not a formal study — we don't have IRB approval, and we're not academics. But if you assume that the resumes people submit to our AI roast tool are roughly representative of the resumes people actually send to employers (a defensible assumption), then the patterns below reflect what recruiters are seeing every day.

What we didn't expect: the distribution of buzzwords across the five categories isn't even. Some categories dominate certain industries. Others are universal. And a few phrases are so common that if you removed them, we'd have to rewrite the BS Detector's calibration.

Here's the breakdown.

The five categories and how often each dominates

The Buzzword Density Score classifies every flagged phrase into one of five categories. Rough share of total buzzword hits across a representative sample of scored resumes:

Empty adjectives are the runaway winner — a third of everything the BS Detector flags is some form of "passionate," "dynamic," "innovative," or "results-driven." Verb inflation is second because it's harder to spot (you can use "spearheaded" once and it reads fine; use it four times and it screams). Corporate clichés are the mid-tier universal fluff. Vague metrics are less common but more damaging when they appear (a bullet with no real number is often the difference between "we should interview this person" and "next"). Title puffery is the least common by volume, but the most memorable when it hits.

Category 1 — Empty Adjectives (~34% of flagged phrases)

The most-flagged category by a wide margin. Empty adjectives are the words that used to mean something and now signal "the writer didn't know what else to put here."

Top phrases we flag most often:

1. "Results-driven" — appears on ~48% of resumes we score. The single most flagged phrase across the entire dataset. Not a close race.
2. "Passionate" — ~41%. Usually in the professional summary. Usually followed by "about [industry]."
3. "Detail-oriented" — ~37%. The great irony being that many of the resumes with "detail-oriented" have inconsistent formatting.
4. "Innovative" — ~29%. Rarely accompanied by an example of the innovation.
5. "Dynamic" — ~21%. Usually in a headline. Almost never justified.
6. "Motivated / Self-motivated" — ~19%. The "trust me" of resume adjectives.
7. "Strategic" — ~17%. Highest rate in consulting-adjacent roles.
8. "Hardworking" — ~14%. Peaks in entry-level resumes.

What it tells us: the empty-adjectives category is the hardest to escape because these words feel safe — they're not wrong, they're not offensive, they don't overclaim. But they also don't say anything. Recruiters have been trained to skim right past them, which means they take up real estate without earning it.

Highest-leverage fix: search your resume for every one of these eight words and remove them unless you can immediately follow with concrete evidence. "Results-driven" alone is filler; "Results-driven — grew ARR from $2M to $9M in 18 months" is fine (but at that point you can just delete "results-driven" and the rest still lands).

We covered the fuller taxonomy of empty adjectives in Resume Buzzwords to Avoid. This category alone is 8 of the 27 phrases we track.

Category 2 — Verb Inflation (~24% of flagged phrases)

The category with the widest gap between how bad it looks and how bad it sounds when you write it. Verb inflation happens when the verb is technically fine but disproportionate to the underlying action.

Top phrases we flag most often:

1. "Led" — ~52% of resumes. NOT flagged when used accurately (leading a team, a project, a rollout). Flagged when used for things that were closer to "attended" or "was on the team for."
2. "Managed" — ~46%. Same story. Fine when it's real management; flagged when it stands in for "coordinated" or "helped with."
3. "Spearheaded" — ~28%. Rarely used accurately. Almost every "spearheaded" we've seen would have been more truthfully written as "led" or "drove."
4. "Championed" — ~19%. Corporate strategy-deck verb that leaks into resumes. Usually means "advocated for."
5. "Orchestrated" — ~15%. Belongs to symphony conductors. On resumes, almost always means "coordinated meetings."
6. "Pioneered" — ~9%. The most-inflated of the bunch. Should be reserved for genuine first-of-kind work; almost never is.

What it tells us: verb inflation is a pattern that emerges when candidates feel their contributions were smaller than they wanted them to be and use a bigger verb to compensate. Recruiters catch it because they've seen a real "spearheaded" recently — usually from a former CTO or a startup founder — and everyone else's spearhead reads as a butter knife by comparison.

Highest-leverage fix: count how many "promoted" verbs appear on your resume. If it's more than 3, downgrade at least half of them. "Led," "drove," "built," and "owned" are stronger than the inflated versions because they read as accurate.

You can catch this in individual bullets by running them through the Bullet Surgeon — it explicitly downgrades inflated verbs unless the underlying accomplishment warrants them.

Category 3 — Corporate Clichés (~19% of flagged phrases)

The fossils. Phrases that were fine in 1998 but have decayed into meaningless resume seasoning.

Top phrases we flag most often:

1. "Team player" — ~44% of resumes. Nobody puts "I sabotage teams" on their resume. The phrase has zero signal value.
2. "Cross-functional / Cross-functional collaborator" — ~38%. The most 2019-corporate-training phrase in the dataset. Often replaces a specific example.
3. "Self-starter" — ~26%. Peaks in early-career resumes.
4. "Go-getter" — ~12%. Hasn't been said sincerely since 2003. Still shows up. Universally cringe-inducing.
5. "Synergy" — ~9%. Miraculously still hanging on. Almost always deletable with zero information loss.
6. "Thought leader" — ~7%. Highest rate in marketing and executive resumes. Almost never accompanied by evidence of actual thought leadership.

What it tells us: the corporate clichés category shrinks fastest with age of resume — younger resumes have fewer, older resumes accumulate them because they get carried forward from one edit cycle to the next. If you haven't rebuilt your resume from scratch in five years, you probably have at least three of these.

Highest-leverage fix: delete all six of these on sight. None of them add information. Every single one is deletable without hurting the resume.

Category 4 — Vague Metrics (~15% of flagged phrases)

The most damaging category despite being fourth in volume. Vague metrics are the phrases that look like accomplishments but contain no actual data.

Top phrases we flag most often:

1. "Improved efficiency" — ~34% of resumes. Improved from what to what? Never specified.
2. "Drove results" — ~27%. The archetypal empty-brag. What results?
3. "Made significant impact" — ~22%. Significant relative to what?
4. "Helped grow" — ~19%. "Helped" softens the claim so much that the bullet says nothing about what the candidate actually did.

What it tells us: vague metrics are where AI-assisted resume writers get in the most trouble. When you ask an LLM to "make this bullet sound stronger" without providing the actual numbers, this is what it produces — plausible-sounding claims that don't survive the "walk me through this" interview question. It's also where the biggest wins are, because the fix is straightforward: put a real number where the vague claim is.

Highest-leverage fix: every bullet on your resume that has a verb-plus-outcome shape but no number needs one added. If you don't have the number, use an approximation ("approximately X%") or a specific-but-verifiable proxy ("grew from Y active users to Z"). Never leave a claim without evidence. Never let AI invent a number for you.

Category 5 — Title Puffery (~8% of flagged phrases)

The smallest category by volume, the loudest by cringe.

Top archetypes we flag most often:

1. "[Function] Architect" ("Customer Experience Architect," "Solutions Architect" for a support rep) — ~6% of resumes have some version.
2. "Growth Ninja / Marketing Rockstar / Sales Wizard" — ~4% combined. Peaked around 2014 and has been declining, but hasn't disappeared.
3. "Chief of [X]" at very-small companies (Chief of Staff at 4-person startups) — ~3%.
4. "Visionary [Role]" — ~2%.

What it tells us: title puffery is the category most concentrated in specific industries. Growth Ninja peaks in marketing / early-stage startups. Architect titles peak in mid-career professionals trying to look more senior. Chief of [X] peaks in genuinely small companies where the title was real but the scope was tiny. Visionary is universal but rare.

Highest-leverage fix: if you invented your title (freelance work, self-employment, small startups) — use the standard industry equivalent. If the title was real but the scope was small, keep the title but let the bullets tell the actual scope. "Chief of Staff at a 4-person startup" is fine when followed by a bullet that shows the scope honestly: "Owned ops, hiring, finance, and product across a 4-person seed-stage team."

The distribution matters more than any single phrase

The most useful insight from watching thousands of scores isn't which phrase to delete. It's this: most resumes score badly because they have a little of every category rather than a lot of any one category.

A resume with two empty adjectives, one inflated verb, one corporate cliché, and one vague metric will typically score a 45-55 — not catastrophic, but recruiters skim past it. A resume with zero of any category will typically score below 20 and stand out immediately.

The reverse-engineered fix isn't "cut buzzwords" as a vague goal. It's:

1. Delete every empty adjective
2. Downgrade inflated verbs where they don't earn the size
3. Delete all corporate clichés
4. Add real numbers to every vague metric OR delete the bullet
5. Use standard titles unless the puffery is genuinely descriptive

Do those five things and the score drops by 30-40 points on average. Recruiters don't need to consciously identify what changed — the resume just reads faster after those edits, and reading faster is what earns the second look.

What we're watching next

Two patterns we don't have enough data on yet but are tracking:

1. AI-generated buzzword density is climbing. Resumes that were clearly AI-written (based on cadence markers we've been informally noting — em dashes everywhere, three-item parallel lists, uniform bullet lengths) tend to score higher on the Buzzword Density Score than human-written resumes, even when the underlying content is stronger. We covered why recruiters can tell if AI wrote your resume — the buzzword pattern is one of the tells.

2. Industry variance. Consulting and finance resumes score higher on the BS Detector on average than tech or creative resumes. We haven't published the numbers because the sample sizes vary too much across industries, but the pattern is consistent enough that we'll do an industry breakdown post at some point.

For now, the actionable takeaway is the same one it's been since we launched the tool: run your resume through the BS Detector, get the score, look at the top offenders it flags, delete or rewrite them. It takes 30 seconds. Recruiters are already skimming past the phrases the tool identifies. You don't lose anything by removing them.