There is a particular register people slip into when writing about themselves. It sounds professional. It fills space. It says nothing.
Here are the five phrases that appear most often in the resumes we score, and what to do with each.
1. "Responsible for"
The most common opener in mid-career resumes, and the weakest.
It describes the scope of your job description, not what you did with it. Every person who ever held your title was responsible for the same things. The question a hiring manager is actually asking is what happened while you were the one responsible.
Before: Responsible for managing the mobile product roadmap. After: Owned the mobile roadmap for a 400k-MAU investing app, shipping 14 releases in 11 months and lifting D30 retention from 22% to 31%.
Same job. One version is a title, the other is evidence.
2. "Worked on"
Worked on how? To what end? For how long? With whom?
"Worked on" is what you say when you were in the room but are not sure how much credit you can claim. That hesitation is legible, and it reads as weakness even when the contribution was real.
If you genuinely contributed, name the contribution. If you genuinely did not, cut the line — it is occupying space that a real achievement could use.
3. "Helped with"
The smallest possible claim a person can make about their own work.
There is an instinct behind it worth respecting: people write "helped with" because they do not want to overstate a team effort. That instinct is right. The execution is wrong. The fix is not to inflate — it is to be specific about your part.
Before: Helped with the onboarding redesign. After: Ran discovery and defined requirements for the KYC onboarding redesign, cutting median completion from 21 minutes to 9.
You have not claimed the whole project. You have claimed your slice of it, precisely.
4. "Team player" / "detail oriented" / "hard working"
These are the resume equivalent of saying "I'm a nice person". Everybody says it. Nobody who is not a team player writes that they aren't one. It is unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable claims carry no information.
Worse, they occupy the summary — the most valuable six lines in the document, the part most likely to actually be read.
Replace with something only you could write. Not "detail oriented" but "Rebuilt reconciliation for 240 enterprise merchants with zero downtime across a nine-week migration". Detail orientation is the conclusion the reader draws, not a claim you make.
5. "Proven track record"
Of what? Proven to whom?
This phrase performs the idea of evidence while providing none. If you have a track record, the resume should demonstrate it in the bullets. If the bullets do not demonstrate it, the phrase will not rescue them.
The pattern underneath all five
Every one of these substitutes a claim about yourself for evidence about your work.
The reason this matters commercially, not just stylistically: a recruiter spends well under a minute on the first pass. In that time they are scanning for concrete, verifiable things. Filler is invisible to them and it is invisible to the software, which weights quantified impact more heavily than any other single factor.
Our scanner counts these phrases explicitly and deducts for them, because in six years of reading resumes they remain the single most reliable predictor of a document that will not convert. See how many appear in yours.