Evidence beats adjectives, always

Every applicant is a strong communicator with excellent attention to detail.

Self-descriptive claims carry no information because they are free to assert and impossible to check. A reader who has seen four hundred documents has read the same adjectives four hundred times, from people who were and were not those things, so the words have been drained of meaning entirely.

What survives is anything that could be false. A number, a named system, a scale, a duration, a specific outcome. Reduced processing time from nine days to three tells a reader something no adjective can, because it is a claim somebody could contradict, and its checkability is exactly what makes it credible.

This does not require everybody to have dramatic achievements. Most work is ordinary and the specifics of ordinary work are still informative: the size of the caseload, the number of sites, the value of the budget, the software, the standard the work was assessed against. These are available to almost anybody and are routinely omitted in favour of adjectives.

The one caution is accuracy. Figures on a document are frequently examined at interview and occasionally afterwards, and a number that cannot be explained does considerably more damage than its absence would have.

The other advantage of specifics is what they do at interview. A document full of concrete claims produces questions about things you actually did, which is the easiest possible interview to perform well in. One full of general descriptions produces general questions, which invite general answers, and the conversation never reaches anything that distinguishes you from the other four candidates who wrote the same sentences.