How to Write Resume Bullet Points

When I transitioned from recruiter to tech resume writer, I wanted to make sure that each resume I wrote landed interviews. I had been a recruiter for years, so I could tell the difference between mediocre and great resume content. The issue though, was that I had to write a repeatable “formula” for writing amazing bullet points consistently.

While analyzing and rewriting 1,500+ resumes, I came up with the “Level System”. It allows me to evaluate bullet points objectively, based on the depth and importance of information provided.

If you’re in the process of rewriting your resume, the Level System is the best checklist you can find. It’s a simple framework you can follow, and I’m giving it to you for free!

How it Works

Each level (1 to 5) is a step at which you ask yourself a question. These questions will help you clarify what you need to include. The goal is to rewrite each of your bullet points to Level 5, which represents the top 1% of resumes.

The more of these details you can add, the more Performance Signals you send recruiters, and the more reason there is for them to say “yes”. What makes the difference between an average resume and a great one is the depth of its content, and this is what drives the screening decisions.

We’ll start with a basic sentence and improve the bullet point at each step. I’ll also explain the reason behind each step and give you a few writing rules that you can apply easily.

Let's get started!

It's a rather simple question, but it might be trickier than you think. After all, you need to decide what to write about. As a general rule of thumb, you should write about each of the individual duties present in your job description.

Not sure which of your duties are worth writing about? I wrote resume guides for each role (technical and non-technical) in tech.

For the purpose of this explanation, let’s say that you’re a software engineer writing about Testing (which is part of the role profile). At level 1, you're simply listing one accomplishment, focusing on what was delivered.

The only information here is that we tested something and what that something was.

Now we're starting the real work. This question helps you focus on the specific tasks involved in your accomplishment.

In Level 1, the recruiter only had a vague idea of your "doing some testing". Now they know you've got experience with both unit and e2e testing.

This is an essential question, especially for technical roles where tools matter. Software engineers: show off the toolbox 🔨
It's time to give hiring managers and recruiters a clear idea of your skill set and tech stack.

This step has another purpose: it provides you with more opportunities for ATS keyword matching.

If you are not sure which tools are worth naming for your role, the resume skills pages list what recruiters actually search for.

It's now getting a bit trickier, but this is where you score extra points with recruiters.

This question will help you talk about your understanding of key methodologies, frameworks, theories, or processes involved in your delivery.

Doing this is important because your prospective employer is likely to employ such methodologies.
It's also worth noting that the key decision maker, the hiring manager, is most likely the one in charge of implementing and enforcing these frameworks. Show them that you care.

Almost there! This is another crucial step which will differentiate you from most of your competition. It does two things:

• It provides the reviewer with a clear idea of your actual impact.
• More importantly, it shows that you care about your impact, at least enough to measure and report it.

One sentence, three lines, one metric. The bug escape rate is the metric a hiring manager actually cares about for a testing program: it tells them the work prevented real production defects. Test coverage is upstream of that outcome; latency, throughput, and cost are unrelated. Picking the right metric is more important than stacking several.

If you do not know what a good number looks like for your role, the resume metrics pages give you the benchmarks recruiters expect to see.

That's it!

Repeat these five steps for every single bullet point this way, then compare your new resume with the old one. The improvement should be obvious to you. This means it will be to recruiters too.

Once your bullets are at Level 5, make sure to use the right ATS compliant resume template so that your work doesn't go to waste!

In my experience, this should place you above 99% of resumes in terms of quality.
Of course, there are other factors at play, but this should give you a considerable advantage.

A question I often get asked is how many bullet points are needed for a job. Cookie-cutter advice online (or your favorite AI tool) will tell you 3-5, but it’s absolute nonsense. There is no “one size fits all” rule here, and not all your job blocks are created equal. Here’s how to know, based on how recruiters review resumes:

Recruiters will mostly focus on your most recent job, because it is often the most relevant and the best representation of your current seniority and skillset. That job block will carry 95% of the decision.

As explained in my article about how recruiters screen CVs, they will use a “role profile” (checklist of core competencies) to score you against their requirements.

This means that each core competency should be targeted with its own bullet. That will often make your main experience longer, with anywhere between 6 and 10 bullet points. More is also acceptable, depending on your seniority and scope.

Secondary roles (position 2 and 3), however, should be focused on two things:

• Missing areas of the role profile that you couldn’t target with the most recent experience (because you didn’t do it).
• Your key accomplishments or projects. Meaning, what was most impactful or impressive.

These jobs will realistically have between 4 and 6 bullet points, though there is no strict rule.

For older roles, you should summarize the content in one or 2 bullet points. Recruiters won’t care much about them so you want to de-emphasize them visually.

As a general rule, each of your bullet points should start with an action verb in the past tense: “Led, Drove, Managed...”. This is a standard in resume writing, but I’d argue that most of the benefit is framing your duties as completed accomplishments.

One of the big issues of being a recruiter (or a hiring manager) is figuring out how involved a candidate actually was in the projects described in their resume. You wouldn’t believe how many people write about accomplishments they did not significantly contribute to.

Using clear and concrete action verbs tells recruiters what you did, rather than what was done. The actual verbs matter less than you think: recruiters won’t care about the specific vocabulary as long as it is clear. Avoid weak openers like "responsible for", "helped with" and "worked on", because they don’t express full ownership or concrete involvement.

If you don’t know where to start, here are the 50 verbs I see most often on the resumes that get interviews, grouped by the kind of work they describe.

Here is what the difference looks like in practice. Each pair below is the same duty, written at Level 1 and then at Level 5, taken from my resume guides.

You’ll notice that the work hasn’t changed between two versions, but how the work is presented makes all the difference. This is what the Level System gets you :-)

Software engineering

Data and machine learning

DevOps and cloud

You might have read about other bullet point writing frameworks. There are many, all with their own acronym. Let’s review these frameworks individually and see how they compare to the Level System.

“STAR” stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result and it’s probably the most famous framework when it comes to the job searching space. The big misunderstanding though, is that it is made for interviews, not resume writing!

It’s a storytelling framework that structures your answer based on a timeline: It starts with a problem or context (Situation), which you analyzed and made a plan to solve (Task), before implementing (Action) and analyzing the outcome (Result).

That works very well when describing a project, but not when writing a bullet point for a duty. When writing bullet points, there is no need for a context and we focus on the Task and Results parts, which have more technical depth than a high-level STAR answer would provide. We’re talking about a different dimension of your work.

PAR (Problem - Action - Result) is a shorter version of STAR. It is slightly more reductive in which it specifies the situation (it has to be a problem) and the “Task” part is included into “Action”.

Again, this is a narrative-driven framework which works well for situational interview questions (“Tell me about a time when X happened and you had to deal with it”), but not bullet points.

Now let’s talk about Google’s XYZ formula. This one is actually made for resume bullet points and it is a perfectly acceptable framework. Having been recruited for Google, I was heavily influenced by it when theorizing the “Level System”.

It’s structured like this: Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]. It is practical and it focuses on the right parts (what: X, how: Z and the result/metric: Y).

So why did I bother creating a different framework? Well, the XYZ formula is a step in the right direction, but it’s too generic. It doesn’t tell you anything about the actual depth of information needed for Z (how). Yet, the “how” is what makes most of the difference between a stellar candidate and an average one. “Z” gives you no indication as to what type of information should be included, especially for technical roles.

The Level System unbundles Z into three parts: Techniques, Tools and Methodology. It’s a much clearer and more reliable guidance to write the best bullet points possible.

Let’s be honest, you’re probably going to ask Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT to help you with the writing. That’s absolutely fine, if you make sure to tell it what information (Levels 1 to 5) to add. AI doesn’t know what recruiters or hiring managers look for in bullet points, nor does it know the specifics of your work. If you give it no instruction, you’ll end up with the same generic fluff as anyone else. That gets you rejected. Content, and the information it carries, is what actually matters (which is why I get more requests than ever before).

That’s for content. But we still should talk about form, because there are a few easy “tells” that I still see every day on resumes. Recruiters hate spending time screening what looks like a low effort resume.

First, avoid the infamous em dash (—). That’s the number one signal that text was written by AI, which overuses it.

Then try to stay away from verbs that AI uses constantly. Here’s a good list for you:

You can list them once, but if you let AI loose, you’ll see way too many of them.

Lastly, make sure you use simple and clear vocabulary. AI tends to use vague formulations which are painful to read and understand. Resume writing is about communicating your accomplishments effectively, so common words are fine!