Recruiters first take a quick look at bullet points under the experience section. If it seems a good match with the job description, they take a look at other sections of the resume.

The best way to describe your experience is by stating specific accomplishments and results.

But most job seekers write their experience section like this

  • Responsible for planning plant operations
  • Managed daily activities and projects for large customer accounts

And then they complain that they don’t get shortlisted in spite of having appropriate experience.

Why is that?

These sentences explained what their bosses assigned them to do. They didn’t describe the outputs and results.

Now, let’s look at how to write the bullet points to get shortlisted for interviews.

Here are the types of achievements

Types of Professional Achievements for Resume

  • Revenue or money you generated for the company
  • Reduce costs, saved time, increase efficiency, increase speed of operation
  • Problems you identified and solved
  • New ideas or innovations you introduced
  • Procedures or systems you developed, implemented, or optimised
  • Created new markets, enter new geographies
  • Helped reduce risks, comply with regulatory requirements
  • Special projects you completed
  • Industry awards or inside-company recognition you won
  • Additional training or professional certifications you completed
  • Funding, grants or scholarships you received
  • Popular publications, reports or media articles you (co)authored

Now, let’s look at some of the examples.

Examples of resume bullet points

  1. Maintained a 97% customer satisfaction rating as a customer care representative.
  2. Exceeded department sales goals by an average of 15% quarter-on-quarter in 2016.
  3. Cut page loading time by 50% by building a new cloud infrastructure, leading to a better customer experience.
  4. Led and managed a team of 10 Key Account Managers, including recruiting, hiring, and training on the B2B sales process.
  5. Managed meeting schedules and travel plans of 5 corporate executives while performing general office administration tasks.
  6. Upgraded the product with a data security engine to achieve 100% compliance with industry best practices.
  7. Collaborated with 10 hiring managers across 4 offices for recruiting efforts, including writing online job postings, screening candidate resumes and conducting screening interviews.
  8. Mentored the new team of 6 data scientists in the organisation to successfully deploy a new data insights platform ahead of schedule.
  9. Organised the itineraries of 30+ senior executives for the company’s annual leadership retreat.
  10. Grew email subscriber list from 100 to 5,000 in 8 months with the same budgets by creating appropriate lead magnets.
  11. Achieved CPL of Rs 50 while managing Facebook ad campaigns with a monthly budget of Rs100,000.
  12. Created a mobile time scheduling app that got 10000+ downloads without any paid ads.
  13. Completed a two-month internship with XYZ company under the supervision of production engineer.
  14. Published 6 articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics related to microfilm condensation over a 12-month period.
  15. Chaired a monthly meeting with 10 other department heads to implement a strategy that achieved 20% cost reduction in software license costs.
  16. Implemented company-wide work from home policy resulting in an 87% increase in employee satisfaction.
  17. Created a 20-page training manual from scratch for new hires in the marketing department.
  18. Promoted twice in 12 months, from co-management to director-level.
  19. Facilitated the opening of 250 new HNI accounts in 2015.
  20. Created 10 new blog posts, eBooks, and landing pages, making up 30% of the company’s website.

Now, the next steps.

Go back to your resume, analyse the experience section and rewrite it in the form of bullet points.

One last tip.

Use these sentences not just on the resume but also when the recruiters ask you, ‘could you tell me more about your experience.’