A bullet point earns its line by proving something. The reliable shape is action, scope, result: what you did, how big it was, and what changed because of it.
The shape
Start with a verb. Say what you did. End with what happened.
Weak: Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts.
Better: Ran four social accounts for a 30-person brand, growing combined following from 8k to 34k in a year.
The first sentence describes a job. The second one is evidence. A reader can picture the scale, and an interviewer can ask you about it — which is exactly what you want.
Where the numbers come from
You don't need a finance-department metric. Scale, frequency, and time all count:
- How many? Onboarded 40+ new hires.
- How often? Shipped a release every two weeks.
- How much faster or cheaper? Cut month-end close from nine days to four.
- How big was the thing you touched? Owned a $1.2M category.
- Compared to what? Beat the prior year's renewal rate by 11 points.
If you genuinely can't quantify something, don't fabricate a number. Say what changed instead: Rewrote the returns policy that had generated most of our support tickets. Specific beats numeric-but-invented, every time.
Four fixes that usually work
Cut "responsible for" and "duties included." They announce a job description. Lead with the verb instead.
Delete the adjectives about yourself. Highly motivated, detail-oriented team player tells a reader nothing they'll believe. A bullet showing you caught a costly error does.
One idea per bullet. If a bullet has two "ands" in it, it's two bullets — or one bullet and something you can cut.
Two lines maximum. A bullet that wraps to a third line stops being scannable, and scanning is what actually happens on the first pass.
Before and after
Before: Worked with the engineering team to help improve various aspects of the checkout experience, resulting in better performance.
After: Led a checkout redesign with two engineers; cart abandonment fell 14% in the first quarter.
Before: Assisted with the annual budget process.
After: Built the annual budget model for a 60-person division, consolidating input from six department leads.
Why this works
Employers say it plainly. In NACE's employer research, what they're looking for on a resume is evidence — examples of a candidate actually using a skill to solve a problem — rather than a list of skills claimed. Recruiter eye-tracking work points the same way: the resumes that survive a fast first pass are the ones with clear sections and specific, bulleted accomplishments, not dense paragraphs.
More on the reasoning in resume practices we build around.
Good to know
- AI review's suggested edits show your original line beside a rewrite and a short reason. You keep or discard each one.
- Suggestions are built only from what you already wrote. If we can't ground a rewrite in your own content, we hold it back rather than invent the detail. See we never invent your experience.