Résumé bullet points: verbs, numbers, and what to cut

What a bullet is for

Each bullet is one claim about something you did and what changed because of it. The reader is not collecting your duties; they know what an accountant or a nurse or a sales rep does. They are collecting evidence of your level and your results, and they are doing it quickly, so each bullet has to stand on its own.

A useful shape: an action verb, what you did, how or with what, and the result or scale. Not every bullet needs every part, but the first bullet of each job should have all four.

Start with the verb, and choose it precisely

Past tense for past roles, present tense for your current role. Replace “responsible for”, “helped with”, “worked on” and “involved in” with the thing you did: built, negotiated, reduced, launched, audited, trained, migrated, closed. Avoid the inflated set (spearheaded, leveraged, utilised, orchestrated); they signal an effort to impress rather than a fact.

Do not start five bullets in a row with the same verb. Some precise verbs by kind of work:

• Building: built, designed, wrote, shipped, implemented, automated
• Improving: reduced, cut, increased, shortened, fixed, simplified
• Leading: led, hired, trained, coordinated, ran, mentored
• Selling and serving: closed, won, renewed, retained, resolved, onboarded
• Analysing: measured, modelled, forecast, audited, identified, tested

Add the number

Numbers give scale, and scale is what distinguishes a junior from a senior doing the same task. How many, how much, how often, how fast, how big. If there is no metric, there is usually scope: a team of six, three markets, forty clients, twelve releases a year. If you do not know an exact figure, a defensible estimate with “about” or a range is fine; an invented precise number is not, and interviewers can tell.

Where the outcome was never measured, state it concretely in words: “shipped on the original date after two scope changes”, “the template is still in use three years later”.

Say what changed

The difference between a duty and a result is the second half of the sentence. “Managed social media accounts” is a duty. “Grew Instagram from 2,000 to 11,000 followers in nine months by moving to three short videos a week” is a result with a method. The “by” clause tells the reader how you think; the number tells them what it was worth.

Not every bullet can carry a result; some work is maintenance. But the first one or two bullets of every job should, and a job with no results at all is a sign to go back and think harder about what you actually changed.

Length and count

One to two lines each; nothing that spills onto a third line. Three to six bullets for recent and relevant roles, one to three for older or unrelated ones, none for anything more than fifteen years old unless it is the point of the application. Put the strongest bullet first; readers do not reach the fifth. If a role produced more than six strong bullets, the extra ones go into your master document for other applications; the page shows the six that fit this posting.

Choose one convention for the final full stop and keep it. Articles can be dropped (“built API”, not “built the API”) if you do it consistently, but full sentences read more naturally and cost one word.

What to cut

Cut these on sight.

• Duties obvious from the title (“answered phones” for a receptionist)
• “Responsible for” and “duties included”
• Soft-skill assertions: “excellent communication skills”, “team player”
• Internal jargon, project codenames and acronyms no outsider knows
• Tools listed without what you did with them
• Anything you could not explain in two minutes
• “References available on request”

Bullets by kind of work

The shape is the same everywhere; what counts as a number changes.

• Engineering: users, requests, latency, uptime, incidents, cost. “Cut p95 latency from 800 ms to 220 ms by adding a read-through cache.”
• Sales: quota, pipeline, deal size, cycle, retention. “Closed $1.4M against a $1.1M quota; average cycle 34 days.”
• Operations and finance: cost, time, error rate, compliance. “Closed the monthly books in 4 days instead of 9 by automating intercompany reconciliations.”
• Teaching, healthcare, hospitality: volume, outcomes, scores, audits. “Supervised a 28-bed ward on nights; zero medication errors in 2025 audits.”
• Marketing and design: traffic, conversion, reach, adoption. “Redesigned the checkout; completion rose from 61% to 70%.”

A test for every bullet

Before you keep a bullet, run it through four questions. A bullet that fails two of the four is either cut or rewritten; it is not kept because the space would look empty.

• Could a former colleague confirm it as written?
• Does it say what you did, not what the team did; or does it say “with a team of four”?
• Would it survive “how?” in an interview?
• Does it contain at least one specific noun: a tool, a product, a client type, a metric?