Put your strengths into CV, LinkedIn, and interview words
This is for you if the read in your results rings true, but writing it down is where it falls apart. On a resume, LinkedIn, or in an interview, it goes flat, or tips into a brag. You would rather undersell than write a line that isn't you, so it stays stuck where no one hiring can see it.
The strength is real. It's putting it into words that trips you up. You reach for one impressive word to carry it, and a self-graded word, "strategic," "detail-oriented," "a strong communicator," has nothing behind it to check. So it reads generic and bragging at once, and you feel the fake first.
The fix: stop hunting for the perfect phrase and write the same strength three ways, one for each place it lives. A resume, a LinkedIn line, and a spoken answer each read differently.
Start with your results. Open Discovering Your Strengths in your Career Discovery report. It ranks your top strengths, each with a plain "you likely excel at" line. A ✦ marks the rare ones, the ones few people carry in their top ten. Pick one, a rare one or one your target role needs. Do the rare ones first: they are the hardest for anyone else to claim.
That ✦ is only the surface. If you've taken the Superpower profile, it goes deeper: it ranks every strength by how rare it is, shows your exact percentile, and names the rare combinations only you have.
Take one strength and write it three times.
- The resume line. A result, not an adjective. Read the "you likely excel at" line, find the real time you did that, and write what changed: the action and the number. "Rebuilt the onboarding flow; cut first-week drop-off by a third." The number does the bragging so you do not have to.
- The LinkedIn line. One sentence, plain nouns, no adjectives. The thing you reliably do, said the way you would say it to a friend. "I find the hole in a plan before it ships." If a word only rates you, cut it and name the doing.
- The spoken sentence. For when they ask what you are good at. One concrete read plus one honest edge, then stop. "I see the risk early, which sometimes means I ask us to slow down." You are naming a true read, not selling, so it lands as true.
Now say all three out loud. If one sounds like a rating you gave yourself, it is an adjective in disguise, so go back to what you actually did.
Do this for two or three strengths. You leave holding the lines: a resume bullet, a LinkedIn line, and a spoken sentence for each, ready to paste and to say. The words themselves, not a plan to find them.
