The action verbs you should ban from your CV

Open any CV template from the last decade and you'll see the same list of "powerful action verbs." Spearheaded. Orchestrated. Pioneered. Championed. Revamped. Curated.

Real people do not use these words. Nobody goes home and tells their partner they "spearheaded a cross-functional initiative to optimize onboarding." They say "I fixed the signup page and more people signed up." The first sentence is what your CV says. The second is what actually happened.

This is the gap worth closing.

Why these verbs fail

Recruiters read hundreds of CVs a week. When every candidate "spearheaded" something, the word stops meaning anything. It becomes noise — a filler syllable that signals "the actual information is coming next."

Worse, these words are often used to cover for work that wasn't actually that impressive. "Spearheaded the quarterly review process" usually means "scheduled the meeting and sent out the calendar invite." The verb is doing work the underlying accomplishment can't.

A reader knows this. So when they see "spearheaded," they quietly downgrade their trust in the rest of your CV.

The list to cut

Spearheaded. The worst offender. Unless you were literally leading warriors into battle with a pointed stick, use a plainer verb.

Orchestrated. Implies a conductor coordinating a symphony. You probably ran a project with three people and a Notion doc. "Led" or "ran" is fine.

Pioneered. Unless you invented something that didn't exist before (Google the thing first), you didn't pioneer it. You probably built it, shipped it, or started it.

Curated. Once a nice verb for genuine editorial work. Now it's how people describe making a playlist. If your work was "picked the 12 best items from a list," you organized them.

Leveraged. Means "used." Just say "used."

Utilized. Also means "used." Never write "utilized" when "used" will do. It is always the wrong call.

Revamped. Vague in a specific way — it implies change without committing to direction. "Rebuilt," "redesigned," "rewrote," or "replaced" each say something concrete.

Championed. You advocated for something. Say that.

Drove. This one is harder to ban because it's become so common, but "drove" is almost always a place where a sharper verb is available. "Drove a 12% lift in retention" could be "raised retention 12%," "grew retention from X to Y," or — if you're honest — "contributed to retention work that grew 12%."

What to replace them with

Plain verbs that describe the motion accurately. Built. Shipped. Ran. Grew. Cut. Wrote. Designed. Launched. Closed. Trained. Fixed. Hired. Fired. Sold. Negotiated. Tested. Rebuilt.

These words work because they commit to something specific. "Built" is a verifiable claim. "Shipped" means it went live. "Closed" means a deal or a ticket actually reached its end state. Vague verbs dodge verification. Concrete verbs invite it.

A concrete example

Before:

"Spearheaded a cross-functional initiative to optimize customer onboarding, leveraging data-driven insights to drive measurable improvements in user activation."

What does that sentence actually tell me? Almost nothing. I know you did something vaguely related to onboarding and that you think it went well.

After:

"Rebuilt the onboarding flow with the growth team — cut setup time from 11 steps to 4 and raised day-7 activation from 34% to 51%."

Same accomplishment. But now I know what you changed, what you measured, and what the result was. The second version is 26 words instead of 25, and is roughly ten times more useful to the reader.

The verb changed from "spearheaded" to "rebuilt." That single swap forced the rest of the sentence to be honest.

A quick filter

Before you save a CV line, read the verb out loud and ask: would I use this word if I were telling a friend about my week?

If no, swap it. "I spearheaded a new reporting framework" becomes "I built a new reporting dashboard." "I orchestrated the launch" becomes "I ran the launch." "I leveraged data" becomes "I looked at the data" — which, honestly, is usually what happened.

Your CV doesn't need to sound important. The accomplishments, if they're real, already are. The job of the verb is to get out of the way so the numbers and nouns can do their work.

Plain words win. Try it on your next revision — you'll cut about 15% of your CV's length and double its credibility.