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CV bullet points: before and after
Five bullet points rewritten across five different jobs — plus the four habits behind every one of them. No signup required; skim it, use whichever parts are useful, and rewrite your own bullet points with them if you'd rather do it yourself.
Retail sales associate
Before
Responsible for assisting customers and keeping the sales floor tidy.
After
Helped an average of 40+ customers a day on the floor and was the top seller in accessories for 4 of the last 6 months.
Why it works: "Responsible for" describes a duty everyone in the role shares. A number for daily volume and a ranking against other staff is specific to this person and this store.
Project manager
Before
Managed projects and coordinated with team members to meet deadlines.
After
Managed 6 concurrent projects averaging $80,000 in budget, delivering 90% of them on schedule across a 12-person cross-functional team.
Why it works: "Managed projects and coordinated with team members" could describe almost any project manager. The count, the budget size and the on-time rate tell a hiring manager the actual scale this person is used to operating at.
Teacher
Before
Responsible for teaching and managing a classroom of students.
After
Taught 5 sections of 28 students each and raised average end-of-term test scores by 14% over two years through a revised lesson-pacing plan.
Why it works: Class size and a measured score change show the effect of the teaching, not just that teaching happened. The named method (pacing plan) also gives an interviewer something concrete to ask about.
Bookkeeper
Before
Handled bookkeeping duties and reconciled accounts.
After
Reconciled monthly accounts for 3 small-business clients, catching an average of $1,200 in misposted transactions per cycle before it reached their books.
Why it works: "Reconciled accounts" is the job description, not an achievement. The number of clients and the value of errors caught is the part a hiring manager cannot get from the job title alone.
Restaurant server
Before
Worked as a server and provided good customer service.
After
Served tables for a 120-seat restaurant through peak weekend shifts, maintaining a 4.8-out-of-5 average rating across 200+ online reviews.
Why it works: "Good customer service" is every server's self-description. A review average with a sample size behind it is evidence someone else wrote, not a claim the applicant is making about themselves.
The four habits behind every rewrite above
Attach a number to every bullet, even a rough one
A count, a percentage, a dollar figure or a rate turns a duty into a result. If the exact number is not available, a reasonable estimate ("around 30 a week") still beats no number at all.
Lead with the action verb, not "responsible for"
"Responsible for" describes what the job expected of anyone in the seat. Starting with what you actually did — managed, reconciled, taught, served — gets to the specific action a sentence sooner.
State the result, not only the task
A task is what you did; a result is what happened because of it. "Reconciled accounts" is a task. "Caught $1,200 in errors per cycle" is the result a reader is actually scanning bullet points to find.
One achievement per bullet
A bullet that chains two or three accomplishments together with "and" buries the strongest one. Split a compound bullet into separate lines so each result gets its own line to be noticed on.
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