Companies always want highly motivated team players — people with communication skills and organizational skills by the dozen who are self-motivated, results-oriented problem-solvers. And if that sentence doesn’t make your head spin and your stomach hurt, check your resume.

ResumeDoctor.com recently surveyed more than 160,000 resumes and determined that almost half used one or more vague phrases to describe the job applicant’s skills. As people from the Web site explain, using cliches is wasting space in a document that needs to be concise. It’s much better to give examples that demonstrate how you’ve behaved as a team player rather than just saying that you are.

The most common cliches were “communication skills,” listed on 12.6 percent of resumes; “team player,” 7.2 percent; and “organizational skills,” 5.5 percent.

One cause of the problem, I’m sure, is that companies use those sorts of cliches in want ads, and job applicants have gotten used to mimicking the phrases when they reply to ads.

But the ads are supposed to be vague because the company wants to draw a wide range of applicants. Your resume and cover letter, on the other hand, need to be precise. If you do that effectively, you’ll demonstrate your communication skills and making the world a little more buzzword-free.

A brainy effort: There’s an intriguing help-wanted ad in this month’s edition of the Mensa Bulletin from Google Labs, the workers who come up with innovations for the high-powered Internet company. The Bulletin is for members of American Mensa, people whose IQs are in the top 2 percent of the population.

The ad has a picture of a vending machine with more than two dozen snacks, with a number instead of a price under each snack. To the right of the snacks are 21 buttons with different numbers, with the idea being that you need to push five buttons in the right sequence — based on a mathematical formula that is given in the ad — to order each snack. Your goal is to identify which snack is impossible to order.

“Are you a compulsive problem solver?” the ad reads. “You should join us here at Google Labs, where a whole bunch of people who love challenges have come together to change the way the world organizes information. It’s a big job. We may need your big, high-performance brain to help us out.”

Maybe the best part of the ad is in its bottom right corner, in upside-down type: “If you were expecting to find the answer here, sorry. That’s way too easy. But send us the right answer and your resume goes to the front of the line.”

This is the kind of thinking that has helped Google become, well, Google. It’s a smart ad aimed at a particularly smart audience, with a chance to get the attention of people who already have jobs and wouldn’t think of looking at a want ad under normal circumstances.

Besides that, the responses will be from people who put the time and effort into answering a tough problem. That certainly doesn’t ensure they’ll be great employees, but it’s a much better pool that you would attract with a normal “send us your resume” ad.

In any sort of job screening, smart managers want to see how applicants perform, rather than just listening to how glib they are in interviews. Con men can give great interviews, and just about anybody can offer three decent references.

Whenever possible, ask for samples of their work, or assign them a task, or ask for suggestions on a project you’re contemplating. That will give you real insight.

My math background is certainly not extensive enough to say whether some sophisticated formula could help people solve the Google snack machine problem, but anyone with decent math skills, a pocket calculator and a little patience could answer it. I did. It’s just simple multiplication, addition and subtraction — plus a little effort, of course.

But you also need to like challenges and to be a little compulsive. Sometimes that’s what it takes to get the job done — or to get the job.