Most graduate CVs contain the phrase "stakeholder management" and almost none of them mean anything by it. Recruiters at large firms report spending somewhere between six and eleven seconds on a first-pass read, which is not enough time to decode a euphemism, so the phrase functions as filler that costs you one of the very few lines you get.

The problem is structural rather than lazy. University careers services teach a competency vocabulary designed to map onto graduate application forms, and that vocabulary is deliberately generic so it can be applied to any experience. It survives into the CV because nobody tells the candidate that the form and the CV have opposite goals.

What replaces it is specificity that a reader can picture. "Coordinated 14 volunteers across three sites for a fundraising event that raised $22,000" tells a recruiter about scale, coordination, and outcome in one line, and it does so without using a single competency word. The reader builds the inference themselves, which is considerably more persuasive than being told.

Numbers do most of the work here, and the useful ones are often smaller than candidates expect. A tutoring job with nine regular students is a real fact about consistency and client relationships, whereas "developed strong interpersonal skills" from the same job is not a fact about anything. Graduates routinely discard the concrete version because it sounds too modest.

The same logic applies to the technical claims. Listing Excel as a skill is meaningless when 94 per cent of applicants list it too, while naming the specific thing you built — a rostering model, a reconciliation macro — separates you immediately. The test worth applying to every line is whether a competing applicant could have written it about themselves without changing a word.