How to write resume bullet points

A resume bullet has one job: to make a stranger who is reading fifty of these believe you did something real. It has about two seconds and one line and a half to do it.

The shape

The third one is not longer because it is padded. It is longer because it contains three facts the first one does not: what you changed, what the scale was, and what happened as a result.

Do not use STAR here

STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result — is an interview framework and it is a good one. On a resume it actively hurts, and this is a real disagreement with a lot of standard advice.

Situation and Task are setup. In a conversation the setup is what makes the story land. On a page being scanned in six seconds, the setup is the part the reader’s eye skips to get to the verb — so a literal STAR bullet spends its first line on context and pushes the only part anyone reads onto the second line, or off the end.

Write Action and Result. Keep exactly as much situation as is needed for the result to make sense, which is usually a clause and sometimes nothing at all. Save the full version for the interview, where STAR belongs.

Getting a number when you think you have none

“My job wasn’t measurable” is nearly always false. It usually means revenue was not the measure. Try these — and if none fits, there is a whole post on showing a result when you have no numbers:

• Volume. How many? Per day, per sprint, per quarter. Tickets, releases, students, invoices, articles, interviews, sites.
• Scale. How big was the thing? Team size, budget, user count, rows in the table, branches, SKUs.
• Time. How long did it take before, how long after. Time-to-X is the most under-used metric on resumes.
• Frequency. Something that used to break weekly and now breaks quarterly is a strong result.
• Range. “Between 8 and 12 a week” is honest and still a number. A range beats a blank.
• The counterfactual. What would have happened without it. “Avoided a licence renewal of about $40k” is a result.

Estimate openly rather than inventing. “roughly 40” and “about 15%” are fine and nobody objects. A precise-looking figure you cannot explain is the thing that ends interviews — the interviewer asks how it was measured and there is no answer.

Verbs

Start with a verb, past tense, except for the job you currently hold. Skip Responsible for, Helped with, Worked on and Assisted in — each one describes proximity to work rather than work.

Pick a verb that says what kind of work it was. Built, Rebuilt, Migrated, Automated, Negotiated, Reduced, Consolidated, Launched, Recovered, Diagnosed, Trained, Standardised. Do not thesaurus your way to Spearheaded and Orchestrated; they read as inflation and they are the standard tell of a generated bullet.

Never write in the first person. No I, no my. It is a resume convention and breaking it is noticed immediately.

How many, and how long

Ten bullets on one job is not thoroughness, it is an unranked list. The reader assumes the first two are your best; if they are not, you have chosen badly for them.

Examples by role

The same move — duty out, change in — in five jobs that do not think of themselves as measurable. Every number on the right is the kind a person in that role actually knows or can estimate honestly.

Five failures that are easy to fix

• Duties, not achievements. If the bullet would be true of anyone who held the title, it says nothing about you.
• A number with no baseline. “Increased engagement by 300%” from what? Three to twelve is 300%.
• Team credit as personal credit. “Led” when you contributed is the claim that collapses under one question. “As part of a team of four, owned the X piece” is stronger, because it is checkable.
• Jargon from a company nobody else worked at. Internal project names and internal tools mean nothing outside the building.
• Every bullet identically constructed. Real work is uneven and uniform bullets read as a template. See what recruiters actually notice.

Two formatting notes that are not cosmetic

Do not type your own bullet character. If the template already draws a marker, a typed • or - prints beside it and also lands in the extracted text. This is the most common thing that goes wrong when people paste bullets between documents.

Make sure they are a real list. Bullets built out of positioned decorations rather than list markers can extract out of order — every bullet in the document coming out after every employer, so no achievement is attached to the job it belongs to. The page looks perfect. Details in what CSS breaks resume parsing.

Keywords, without keyword stuffing

A bullet is the right place for the terms in the job posting, because it is the place where the term is attached to evidence that you did it. Repeating a skill name in a list at the bottom of the page is not the same claim. See resume keywords that matter and tailoring to a job description.

Where this site fits

GetFinalCV has a rewrite button that works on two or three bullets at a time rather than the whole document, deliberately: a scope small enough that you can actually read the proposed change before accepting it. A rewrite that quietly touched your job title would get approved by someone who never looked at one.

The prompt is action-and-result, not STAR, for the reason above. And when it wants a number it does not have, it marks the bullet as carrying an unverified figure and asks you for the real one instead of inventing something plausible. An invented metric is worse than a vague bullet, because the vague bullet does not fall apart in the interview.