The Buzzword Sommelier

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Your resume archetype

The Buzzword Sommelier

You don't write bullets. You curate a tasting menu of corporate vintage.

The tells

1.“Leveraged” appears more often than your own job title.
2.You've synergized things that have never met.
3.Recruiters can smell the “results-driven” from the subject line.

The fix: Swap the vintage for numbers. One real metric beats five thought-leadership adjectives.

Check your Buzzword Density Score→

Email me my archetype (and the fix)

The tells, the fix, and the links. One email, no newsletter spam.

That was 8 questions guessing. The real roast reads your actual resume: letter grade, Buzzword Density Score, and exactly what's wrong. Free, 30 seconds.

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What the pattern actually is

Beneath the joke, the Buzzword Sommelier is a specific, fixable writing habit.

The Buzzword Sommelier isn't lazy — usually the opposite. This pattern comes from caring how the resume sounds, reading a lot of LinkedIn, and absorbing the house style of corporate writing so thoroughly that it replaced the facts. Every bullet has been polished until the specific thing that happened is no longer visible inside it.

The tell is substitution: where a number should be, there's an adjective. Where a decision should be, there's a verb like 'spearheaded' that sounds like leadership without naming anything led. Our own data backs this up — 'results-driven' appears on roughly half the resumes we score, which means the phrase carries exactly zero information. A recruiter who has read four hundred of these this week doesn't think 'impressive vocabulary.' They think 'what is this person hiding?'

What it costs you

Fluff isn't neutral filler — it displaces evidence. Every 'dynamic self-starter leveraging cross-functional synergies' is a line where a real accomplishment could have lived, and screeners skim past exactly those lines. High buzzword density also pattern-matches to AI-generated and template resumes, which some reviewers now discard on sight. You get read as generic even when the career underneath is anything but.

The fix, demonstrated

One bullet, rewritten out of the pattern.

Before

Results-driven marketing professional leveraging data-driven insights to drive impactful engagement across key digital channels.

After

Rebuilt the email program from one monthly blast into six segmented flows; attributed revenue went from $18k to $71k a month in three quarters.

The first sentence could describe anyone in marketing and therefore describes no one. The second can only describe one person — and it's checkable, which is what makes it credible.

The Buzzword Sommelier questions

Are buzzwords ever fine on a resume?

A few are unavoidable — some are real ATS keywords, and stripping every one produces prose that reads oddly flat. The problem is density and substitution: when the buzzword replaces the evidence instead of accompanying it. 'Led cross-functional launch, $2M first-year revenue' is fine. 'Cross-functional thought leader' with no launch and no number is the pattern that costs interviews.

How do I know which of my phrases are the problem?

Run the free BS Detector — it scores your resume 0-100 on buzzword density across five categories and names the worst offenders. Anything flagged 'empty adjective' or 'vague metric' is a line where evidence got replaced. The fix list is usually shorter than people fear: five surgical swaps typically move the score more than a full rewrite.

Won't removing the corporate language make my resume sound junior?

The opposite, and this is the counterintuitive part: corporate filler reads junior, because screeners level you by evidence and filler contains none. 'Spearheaded strategic initiatives' reads below 'chose to kill two underperforming channels and reallocated $30k a month.' Plain sentences carrying decisions and numbers are the most senior-sounding writing there is.