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Put your strengths into CV, LinkedIn, and interview words

30 min· Career Discovery

This is for you if the read in your results rings true, but writing it down is where it falls apart. On a resume, a LinkedIn profile, or in an interview answer, it goes flat and generic, or tips into sounding like a brag. You would rather undersell than write a line that isn't you, so the strength stays stuck in your head, where no one hiring can see it.

The strength is real. What is failing is the translation. You are reaching for one impressive word to carry it, and a word you grade yourself with, "strategic," "detail-oriented," "a strong communicator," has nothing behind it for the reader to check. So it reads as generic and as bragging at once, and you feel the fake in it before anyone else does.

The fix is to stop hunting for the perfect phrase and write the same strength three ways, one for each place it has to live. A resume, a LinkedIn line, and a spoken answer are read differently, so the same true thing has to be said in three registers.

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 traits most people do not carry in their top ten. Pick one to start, a rare one or one the role you are chasing needs. The rare ones are worth doing first, because they are the hardest for anyone else to claim.

That ✦ is only the surface of it. If you've taken the Superpower profile, it goes deeper on exactly these rare strengths: it ranks every strength by how rare it is, shows the exact percentile you land in, and names the rare combinations only you have.

Take that one strength and write it three times.

The resume line. A result, not an adjective. Read the strength's "you likely excel at" line, find the real time you did exactly that, and write what you did and what changed: the action, the specific thing, a number or an outcome. "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 who asked. "I find the hole in a plan before it ships." If a word only rates you, cut it and name the doing instead.

The spoken sentence. For the moment they ask what you are good at. One concrete read plus one honest edge, then stop. "I am the person who sees the risk early, which sometimes means I am the one asking us to slow down." You are naming a true read, not selling, which is why it lands as true.

Now say all three out loud, once. If any of them sounds like a rating you gave yourself, it is still an adjective in disguise, so go back to what you actually did and start there.

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 ready to say. The words themselves, not a plan to find them.

An example

Priya is an operations analyst. Her resume said "detail-oriented, strategic thinker, strong communicator." Every line was true. Every line also sounded like everyone else's, and she knew it, so she kept the resume vague and hoped the interview would go better.

Then she opened her strengths and saw one flagged rare: she spots the flaw in a plan before it goes live. So she wrote it three times.

On the resume: "Caught a billing error in a launch plan a week before go-live and saved the rollout." On LinkedIn: "I find the problem in a plan before it ships." Out loud, for interviews: "I am the one who sees the risk early, which sometimes means I am the one asking us to slow down."

Same strength, three lines, none of them a brag. For the first time, the words on the page sounded like the thing she actually did.

Why we built this

One thing we keep noticing: people have the right read on themselves and still cannot write it down without it going generic or feeling like a boast. The reason is small. A strength written as an adjective is a rating you gave yourself, and the reader has to take it on faith, so it reads as either empty or immodest. A concrete read, the thing you did in plain words, lets them draw the conclusion themselves, and no one calls a specific true thing a brag. We also tend to misjudge how our own self-promotion lands: research on bragging (Scopelliti, Loewenstein and Vosgerau, 2015) finds people who talk themselves up overestimate how impressed others are and underestimate the annoyance, which is why the safer move is to let a detail do the claiming. The three surfaces exist because a resume, a profile, and a spoken answer are each read in a different register, so the same true thing has to be said three ways.

Put your strengths into CV, LinkedIn, and interview words

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