The follow-up I owed myself. Last week I reverse-engineered 5 ATS systems and that post hit harder than I expected, partly because it gave readers a mental model but mostly because it made them ask the obvious follow-up question:
Okay, but which words specifically should I delete from my resume?
So I ran another batch — 200 anonymized resumes through 5 different ATS-style scoring pipelines (3 commercial, 2 open-source replicas tuned to match the commercial outputs) and looked for phrases that consistently dropped the score relative to a baseline. Here are the 12 worst offenders.
The methodology in one paragraph
For each resume I ran two passes: original, and a "phrase-scrubbed" copy where I removed only the candidate phrase and replaced it with a neutral synonym from a controlled list. I logged the score delta. The phrases below produced an average score drop of at least 4 percentile points across all 5 systems, and at least one system flagged the resume into a lower screening tier.
The 12 phrases
1. "Responsible for"
Single biggest underperformer. Five-system average drop: 6.8 points. ATS keyword extractors weight verb-led phrases higher; "Responsible for" reads as filler before the actual verb. Replace with the actual verb that comes after it.
2. "Helped with" / "Assisted with"
Reads as participation, not contribution. Drop: 5.4 points. The keyword extractor cannot tell whether you owned the thing or carried someone's bag.
3. "Various" (as in "various technologies", "various clients")
Drop: 4.9 points. Vague nouns get downweighted because they cannot match against the job description's specific keywords. Name the technologies. Name the client types. Stop hiding behind "various".
4. "Synergize" / "Synergies"
Drop: 5.1. Old-school ATS dictionaries flagged this as filler in 2014 and the modern ones still inherit that bias. Also: nobody under 50 says synergize unironically.
5. "Innovative solutions"
Drop: 4.6. The phrase has appeared in so many resumes that some scoring models specifically deprioritize it as a "common filler" cluster. If your solution was actually innovative, name what it did.
6. "Team player"
Drop: 4.2. Weirdly persistent on resumes; weirdly punished by every system I tested. Same root cause: it is in 38% of all resumes the systems have been trained on.
7. "Strong communication skills"
Drop: 4.4. Self-assessed soft-skill claims tank against the keyword extractor because they do not match anything in the job description's hard skill section. Your communication will be evaluated in the interview, not on the resume — delete the line.
8. "Familiar with [tool]"
Drop: 5.7. This one surprised me. "Familiar with React" scored worse than just listing "React" in a skills section. The ATS treats "familiar with" as a hedge and discounts the keyword.
9. "Hard worker" / "Detail-oriented"
Drop: 4.1. Same problem as "team player". Soft-skill claims with no evidence are filler.
10. "Multitask" / "Multitasking"
Drop: 4.3. Specifically downweighted in 3 of the 5 systems. Replace with the actual things you did in parallel ("Owned 3 concurrent customer migrations" beats "Multitasked across customer accounts").
11. "References available upon request"
Drop: 3.9. Wastes a line, signals you are not aware that this has been default-assumed since the early 2000s. The ATS does not care; the human reviewer absolutely notices.
12. "Proven track record"
Drop: 4.7. Like "innovative solutions", appears in so many resumes that several systems specifically deprioritize the cluster. Replace with the actual track record (numbers, outcomes, specific projects).
Three patterns these all share
If you read the list back to back, the same three failure modes show up:
- Filler verbs that hide the real verb. Responsible for, helped with, assisted with. Get rid of the helper verb and lead with the action.
- Vague nouns that match nothing in the job description. Various, multiple, several. The ATS scores keyword overlap; vague nouns produce no overlap.
- Self-claimed soft skills with no evidence. Team player, hard worker, strong communicator, detail-oriented. None of them match anything the JD asked for.
What to do this week
Pull up your resume and search for those 12 phrases. Removing them takes maybe 20 minutes. The systems I tested moved an average resume up about 8-12 percentile points just from those deletions, before adding any new keywords from the target job description.
If you want to validate the change, the job description keyword extractor I wrote about earlier will tell you which keywords from a specific posting your resume is missing — that is the additive side of the same fix.
And if you want the bigger picture of what the ATS is actually doing under the hood, the original reverse-engineering post walks through the 5 systems in detail.
