CV Bullet Points
Action verb + achievement + quantified result — writing bullets that get noticed
CV bullet formula
- Formula: [Action verb] + [what you did] + [result/scale] — no "I", no "responsible for"
- Quantify: %, $, time saved, users affected — before/after is stronger than just a %
- Strong verbs: Reduced, Built, Delivered, Architected, Led, Cut, Automated
- Avoid: "helped", "was involved in", "worked on", "responsible for"
- Two metrics beat one — show both business value and engineering impact
Question 0 of 5
Which CV bullet point is written most effectively for a software engineer?
Action verb + specific achievement + quantified result + context is the correct formula. Bullet point anatomy:
- Action verb: "Reduced" — past tense, strong, specific
- What: "API response time" — specific metric, not vague "performance"
- By how much: "by 40% (from 850ms to 510ms)" — before/after is stronger than just a percentage
- How: "by introducing Redis caching" — the technical method
- Scale: "2M+ requests/day" — proves impact matters
Which action verb is strongest for a CV bullet describing a performance improvement?
"Cut" — strong past-tense action verb with before/after quantification. Action verb hierarchy for performance work:
- ✅ Strong: Cut, Reduced, Decreased, Improved, Optimised, Accelerated
- ⚠️ Weak: Helped, Was involved in, Worked to, Assisted with — these dilute your ownership
A CV bullet reads: "Increased user engagement." What is missing?
Missing: metric, feature, and scale. How to fix it:
- ❌ "Increased user engagement"
- ✅ "Increased weekly active users by 23% (from 12K to 15K) over 60 days by redesigning the onboarding flow and reducing time-to-first-action from 8 steps to 3"
- Metric: what was measured (WAU, revenue, load time, error rate)
- Magnitude: how much it changed (%, absolute number, or both)
- Method: what you specifically did to cause the change
Which of these CV bullets is best for a developer who led a migration?
Technical scope + business outcome + two quantified wins. Breakdown of option B:
- "Migrated legacy monolith to AWS microservices" — clear what was done
- "(12 services)" — scope quantified
- "reducing infrastructure costs by $180K/year" — business outcome
- "cutting deployment time from 2 hours to 8 minutes" — engineering outcome with before/after
Which opening word is weakest for a CV bullet point?
"Responsible for" describes a job description, not an achievement. Why "responsible for" fails:
- It says what you were supposed to do — not what you did
- It implies task ownership, not impact
- Recruiters skip over it — it reads like a job description copy-paste
- ❌ "Responsible for the deployment pipeline"
- ✅ "Rebuilt the deployment pipeline, cutting release cycle from 2 weeks to 1 day"
- Building: Architected, Built, Developed, Engineered
- Impact: Delivered, Reduced, Increased, Cut, Improved
- Leadership: Led, Mentored, Scaled, Hired
- Process: Streamlined, Automated, Standardised