CV bullet points that show impact, not duties

A job description tells a recruiter what the role involves. A CV has to tell them what you did inside that role that someone else might not have done. Most CVs lose the interview in exactly this gap.

The difference in one line

Duty: responsible for the social media accounts. Impact: grew the company's Instagram from 1,200 to 9,800 followers in eight months, producing the weekly content calendar and shooting all product photography.

Both statements are about the same job. The second one can be checked, compared and remembered.

A structure that works

Every bullet can follow the same three parts:

1. A strong verb — built, cut, negotiated, launched, rewrote, trained
2. What you actually did — the specific action, not the job title
3. The result, in a number, a person or a thing — who benefited, how much, how fast

Not every bullet needs a percentage. "Cut invoice processing from nine days to three" is strong without a single currency figure.

Before and after

Operations Before: Responsible for stock ordering and supplier contact. After: Consolidated five suppliers into two, cutting stock-outs on best-sellers from roughly weekly to one a quarter.

Customer service Before: Handled customer complaints. After: Rewrote the refund process after analysing 300 complaints, cutting repeat contacts by a third.

Teaching Before: Taught Year 4 and planned lessons. After: Introduced a weekly reading intervention for twelve struggling pupils, seven of whom moved up a book band by July.

Administration Before: Supported the management team with scheduling and paperwork. After: Managed diaries and board papers for a team of four directors, keeping 60+ meetings a year on schedule and never missing a statutory filing.

Hospitality Before: Worked on the bar during busy shifts. After: Ran the bar alone on Friday nights for 200+ covers, training two new starters and holding the till variance under 0.5%.

When you do not have numbers

Plenty of good work has no metric attached. Use scale instead — the size of the team, the budget, the number of customers, the geography, the deadline. "Sole designer for a 40-page annual report delivered in six weeks" is concrete without a single percentage.

If you genuinely cannot quantify, describe the consequence: what would have gone wrong without you, what got faster, who stopped having to do it.

Keep every bullet short

One idea per bullet, two lines at most, no full stop at the end if the rest of your CV follows that style. A recruiter skimming a CV reads the first four or five words of each line; put the verb and the result as close together as the sentence allows.

Check it is still true

The temptation, once you know the formula, is to inflate. Do not. A number invented on a CV surfaces in the interview, and the cost of that is far higher than a modest bullet. Sharpen what happened; do not add what did not.