The formula
Action verb → what you built or changed → the tool or method named in the posting → the measurable outcome. Keep it to one or two lines; three-line bullets get skimmed past.
- Verbs that work: led, shipped, built, migrated, reduced, negotiated, automated, recovered.
- Verbs to drop: assisted with, was responsible for, participated in, helped.
Find a number even when the work feels unmeasurable
Almost every task has a volume, a frequency, a duration, a rupee value or a headcount attached to it. If you truly cannot measure the outcome, measure the input.
- Volume: tickets, accounts, campaigns, records, releases per month.
- Time: hours saved per week, cycle time before and after.
- Money: revenue influenced, cost avoided, budget managed.
- Scale: team size, users served, regions covered.
Before and after
- Support: "Handled customer queries." → "Resolved 120+ weekly support tickets in Zendesk, holding CSAT at 4.7/5 across two quarters."
- Finance: "Prepared monthly reports." → "Closed monthly IFRS reporting for three entities, cutting close time from 9 to 5 working days."
- Marketing: "Ran social media." → "Ran paid social across LinkedIn and Meta on a ₹4L monthly budget, lifting qualified leads 38% year on year."
- Engineering: "Worked on the API." → "Migrated 22 REST endpoints to a typed Node.js service, reducing p95 latency from 780ms to 210ms."
How many bullets per role
- Current role: 4–6 bullets. Previous role: 3–4. Anything beyond five years back: 2, or a single line.
- Roles older than about ten years can be a compact list of titles, employers and dates.