Writing

Writing resume bullet points that land

Bullet points are where a resume is won or lost. Most people write responsibilities — a description of the job as it appeared in the contract. Strong resumes write evidence: what changed because you were there.

Tom Aldridge · Hiring manager, productUpdated 25 July 20263 min read

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The short version

Write evidence, not responsibilities. What changed because you were there?
The pattern: a verb, what you did with specifics, and the outcome or the scale.
Three to five bullets on recent roles, one or two on older ones.
Numbers exist in almost every job — volume, frequency, duration, people, money, time saved.
Where no number exists, name the consequence: what became possible, or what stopped happening.

Responsibilities vs. evidence

"Responsible for the company's social media channels" tells a reader your job title, which they already know. "Grew the company's LinkedIn following from 2,000 to 30,000 in eighteen months, driving a third of inbound demo requests" tells them what you can do.

The difference is not seniority or luck. It is that the second sentence names an outcome and attaches a number to it.

The pattern

Verb, then scope, then outcome. "Rebuilt the onboarding flow for 40,000 monthly signups, cutting drop-off by a third." Not every bullet has all three, but a bullet with none of them is doing no work.

Open with a strong past-tense verb — Led, Rebuilt, Cut, Shipped, Negotiated, Migrated, Automated. Avoid the weak openers: Responsible for, Helped with, Worked on, Assisted in.

Finding numbers you think you don't have

Almost every role has quantities in it; most people just never wrote them down. Scale, frequency, time, money, and people are the five places to look.

How many users, customers, tickets, or requests did it touch?
How often — daily, per release, per quarter?
How much time did it save, and for how many people?
What did it cost or earn, even approximately?
How many people did you lead, train, or coordinate?

When you genuinely have no number

Describe the change instead of inventing a metric. "Replaced a manual weekly reconciliation with an automated job, removing a recurring source of month-end errors" has no number and still shows judgement and outcome.

Never estimate upward to fill the gap. An invented figure is the easiest thing in the world to fall apart on when someone asks how it was measured.

Before and after

The same facts, written twice. Nothing has been added to the right-hand column that was not already true on the left — which is the whole point, and the reason this is editing rather than invention.

Engineering

Before

Worked on improving site performance

After

Cut largest-contentful-paint from 4.1s to 1.2s across the marketing site, lifting mobile conversion 12%

Operations

Before

Helped with the migration to the new CRM

After

Migrated 60,000 customer records to HubSpot with no reported data loss, and trained the 12-person sales team on the new workflow

Management

Before

Responsible for managing a team

After

Took over a team of six mid-project after the lead left, and shipped on the original date

No number was available for the outcome, so the bullet names the consequence instead. That is the fallback when nothing was measured.

Administrative

Before

Managed executive calendars and travel

After

Managed four executive calendars averaging 35–45 meetings a week, and booked about 120 trips a year against a $480k travel budget

Run this over every bullet

Open your own resume beside this and work down it. Every line is something a reader or a parser acts on within the first pass.

It starts with a verb, not with "responsible for" or "duties included"
It says what you specifically did, not what the team did
It ends in a result, a scale, or a consequence
It carries a number where one honestly exists
It is under about thirty words and fits on two lines
It is past tense for past roles, present for the current one
You could answer "can you give me an example?" in five seconds
It is not the same verb as the two bullets above it

Templates that give bullets room

A strong bullet runs to two lines. Templates that squeeze the body text to fit more on the page turn good writing into a wall — these keep the line height and margins where they should be.