Recruiters spend seconds on a first pass, and your bullets carry most of the weight. The difference between a resume that gets a call and one that doesn’t is usually here: duties versus results.
“Responsible for social media” describes a job. “Grew Instagram followers from 2,000 to 11,000 in a year with a weekly video series” describes you in that job.
The formula: action + what you did + result
Every strong bullet has three parts:
- An action verb that says what you did: built, cut, led, launched, negotiated.
- The work, specific enough to picture: which tool, which process, for whom.
- The result, ideally a number: time saved, money made, errors reduced, people served.
Built a demand forecast in Python for 1,200 stores that cut stock-outs by 22%.
No exact number? Use scale (how many, how often, how big), or the outcome in words (“adopted by all three regional teams”).
Action verbs that work
Start each bullet with a different verb. Avoid “responsible for”, “helped with” and “worked on”.
| If you… | Use |
|---|---|
| Made something new | built, created, designed, launched, developed, introduced |
| Made something better | improved, streamlined, cut, reduced, increased, automated |
| Led people | led, coached, trained, managed, hired, mentored |
| Won something | negotiated, closed, secured, won, grew, expanded |
| Fixed something | resolved, restored, recovered, corrected, rebuilt |
| Analysed something | analysed, forecast, modelled, audited, measured, identified |
40 before-and-after examples
Software and data
- Before: Worked on backend services. After: Rebuilt the payments API in Go, cutting p95 latency from 420 ms to 110 ms.
- Before: Wrote tests. After: Raised test coverage from 38% to 81%, and production incidents fell by half over two quarters.
- Before: Made dashboards. After: Built weekly sales dashboards in Power BI for 40 store managers, replacing 6 hours of manual Excel work.
- Before: Did data cleaning. After: Cleaned and modelled 40M rows of billing data, uncovering $310K in under-billed accounts.
- Before: Helped with deployments. After: Automated deployments with GitHub Actions, taking releases from weekly to daily.
See a full software engineer resume example and a data analyst resume example.
Sales and customer service
- Before: Responsible for new clients. After: Closed 34 new mid-market accounts worth $1.2M ARR, finishing at 126% of quota.
- Before: Made cold calls. After: Booked 60+ discovery meetings a quarter from cold outreach, the top rate on a team of 9.
- Before: Handled customer complaints. After: Resolved 45 tickets a day at 96% satisfaction, and wrote 12 help articles that cut repeat questions by 20%.
- Before: Upsold products. After: Raised average order value by 15% by bundling warranties at checkout.
- Before: Worked with key accounts. After: Managed 18 key accounts and renewed 100% of them, including 4 multi-year deals.
More in the account executive and customer service examples.
Marketing and design
- Before: Ran social media. After: Grew Instagram from 2,000 to 11,000 followers in 12 months with a weekly video series.
- Before: Wrote blog posts. After: Wrote 30 SEO articles that now bring 18,000 visits a month and 300 sign-ups.
- Before: Managed ads. After: Cut cost per lead by 38% by restructuring Google Ads campaigns around 12 high-intent keywords.
- Before: Designed marketing materials. After: Designed a 40-page brand system used by 3 agencies, cutting design revisions by half.
- Before: Sent newsletters. After: Lifted newsletter open rates from 21% to 34% by testing subject lines and send times.
Healthcare and teaching
- Before: Cared for patients. After: Cared for 5–6 patients per shift on a 30-bed cardiac unit, with zero medication errors over 2 years.
- Before: Trained new nurses. After: Precepted 8 new graduate nurses, all of whom passed orientation on schedule.
- Before: Taught math classes. After: Taught algebra to 5 classes of 28 students, and pass rates rose from 71% to 86%.
- Before: Organised school events. After: Started a coding club that grew to 40 students and placed 2nd in the regional hackathon.
- Before: Updated patient records. After: Moved the clinic’s paper records to Epic in 6 weeks with no missed appointments.
See the registered nurse and teacher examples.
Operations, finance and admin
- Before: Did month-end close. After: Owned the monthly close for 3 entities, cutting close time from 9 to 6 days.
- Before: Managed the warehouse team. After: Led a team of 22 across 2 shifts, raising pick accuracy to 99.6% and cutting overtime by 30%.
- Before: Handled scheduling. After: Managed calendars and travel for 4 executives, rebuilding the booking process to save about 5 hours a week.
- Before: Processed invoices. After: Processed 600 invoices a month and cut payment errors by 30% with a new approval checklist.
- Before: Ran a store. After: Ran a store with $3.4M in yearly sales, growing like-for-like revenue 12% while cutting shrink by a third.
More in the accountant, store manager and admin assistant examples.
Students and first jobs
- Before: Group project for a class. After: Led a 4-person team building a course-planning app, now used by 300 students at my university.
- Before: Part-time job at a café. After: Trained 5 new baristas and handled the closing cash count for 2 years with no discrepancies.
- Before: Volunteer. After: Organised a food drive that collected 1,800 kg for 3 local shelters.
- Before: Internship at a bank. After: Built an Excel model comparing 12 loan products, used by the team in client meetings.
- Before: Member of the debate club. After: Reached the national debate semi-finals, and coached 6 first-year members.
See the student resume example, and the guide to an ATS resume for freshers.
Leadership
- Before: Managed a team. After: Grew the team from 4 to 11 people, and kept 100% of them through a restructuring.
- Before: Improved processes. After: Redesigned intake across 3 departments, cutting average turnaround from 10 days to 4.
- Before: Managed budgets. After: Managed a $2.5M budget and finished 4% under plan for two years running.
- Before: Worked with stakeholders. After: Aligned 6 department heads on a new CRM rollout, adopted by 140 staff within one quarter.
- Before: Led projects. After: Delivered a $900K ERP migration two weeks early, with no downtime for customers.
And five bullets you can adapt to almost any job:
- Cut [process] time from [X] to [Y] by [what you changed].
- Trained [N] new [people] on [system or process], all productive within [time].
- Handled [N] [tasks or customers] a [day or week] at [quality measure].
- Spotted [problem] in [area] and fixed it with [action], saving [result].
- Introduced [tool or practice], adopted by [who], leading to [result].
How many bullets per job?
- Current or most relevant job: 4–6 bullets.
- Older or less relevant jobs: 1–3 bullets.
- Jobs older than about 10–15 years: title, employer and dates are often enough.
Order bullets by how much they matter for the job you’re applying to, not by date. Then tailor the top two for each application, as explained in how to tailor your resume to a job description.
Check your bullets automatically
BrightResume flags bullets that start with weak openings (“Responsible for…”), bullets with no number or result, and buzzwords like “results-driven team player”. It then suggests a rewrite you can accept or edit. Every suggestion only uses facts from your own resume.