Your job titles establish what you were; your bullet points establish whether you were any good at it. Most resumes get the first part right and treat the second as a job description, which is why most resumes read the same.
The formula
Action verb → what you did → measurable result. In that order, because the reader is skimming the left edge of the page and the verb is what they land on first.
Was responsible for the customer onboarding process.
Redesigned customer onboarding, cutting time-to-first-value from 11 days to 3 and lifting 90-day retention 16%.
Where the result genuinely defies measurement, substitute scope or complexity — who it affected, how many, under what constraint. "Rewrote the incident-response runbook now used by all four on-call rotations" has no percentage in it and is still concrete.
Finding numbers you think you do not have
Almost every job produces countable facts. Work through these prompts for each role and you will usually surface three or four:
- How many? Accounts, tickets, students, releases, sites, articles, patients, transactions.
- How much? Budget, revenue, spend, savings, contract value.
- How fast? Cycle time, turnaround, response time, time-to-fill, time saved per week.
- How well? Satisfaction score, error rate, uptime, pass rate, retention, quality audit result.
- How many people? Team size, cross-functional partners, stakeholders, people trained.
- Compared to what? Against target, against last year, against the team average.
Verbs: choose the one that is true
Verb lists circulate endlessly and mostly encourage inflation. The only rule that matters is accuracy about your level of ownership. "Led" and "owned" mean you were accountable. "Built" and "designed" mean you produced it. "Supported" and "contributed to" mean you helped — and used honestly for genuinely collaborative work, they cost you nothing, because an interviewer will find out either way.
Worked examples
Helped improve the website.
Cut homepage load time from 4.1s to 1.3s by deferring third-party scripts, lifting mobile conversion 9%.
Engineering — the metric is the change, not the technology.
Managed social media accounts and created content.
Ran the brand's LinkedIn and newsletter, growing subscribers 4K → 31K in 14 months and sourcing 22% of inbound demos.
Marketing — channel, growth, and the business outcome it fed.
Responsible for classroom instruction and lesson planning.
Taught four sections of Year 10 mathematics (128 students); raised cohort proficiency from 61% to 78% over two years.
Teaching — scope first, then the outcome for students.
How many bullets per role
- Current or most recent role: four to six.
- Previous role: three to four.
- Anything older than about eight years: one or two, or a single line for the whole position.
- Roles older than fifteen years: employer and title only, grouped under "Earlier career".
Keep each bullet to one or two lines on the page. A five-line bullet is a paragraph wearing a dot, and it will be skipped by exactly the reader you were trying to reach.