I’m spilling all of the corporate tea in this “Ask Breakroom Buddha” series.
If you have a career question that you’d like me to answer send your question here! You might be featured on the next Ask Breakroom Buddha post!
I’ll skip the small talk, and get right to it! Here are a few common resume bullet point questions, and their solutions.
Q: What type of language should never be included in my resume bullet points?
- Any suggestive language or weak verbs should be removed and replaced with stronger action verbs (i.e. “helped out, trained up, etc.”).
- This is also true if you’re talking about a job title or role that you’ve held. For example, instead of saying “emerging” or “aspiring” social media specialist” say “social media specialist” and continue to list the work that you’ve done in that role.
Q: How many bullet points should I include on my resume?
- Remember you want to have impactful bullet points. That means that a good resume bullet point could potentially take up a few lines.
So if you’re including at least 3 relevant jobs on your resume and they all include about 2-3 bullet points underneath them, that means you could potentially take up to 18 lines on your resume.
This doesn’t include the job summary section or things like your skills sections either. Long story short, you should keep your bullets to 2-3 per job. - Remember to balance your resume bullet points as well. If you use 3 resume bullet points for one job, use 3 for all of the other jobs you’ve listed on your resume.
Q: What should every resume bullet point include?
- Remember that your impact and results matter! Always, always, always, include the following in every resume bullet point:
- A Result: What changed because you did or completed a specific task?
- Your Impact: Time lengths, Percentages, # of people affected, etc.
If you ever get stuck or need to check to see if your resume bullet points are impactful, just use the 4Ws resume bullet point formula. Ask yourself:
- What did I do?
- Who did I help?
- Why did I do it?
- What was the outcome?
- Bonus Question: How long did it take?
Q: Are paragraphs better than resume bullet points?
This is a personal preference. Personally, I use both methods. But, instead of a long paragraph, I use a few brief sentences to describe what my general job entails or what my biggest impact was.
I then go on to describe key accomplishments/major impacts that I’ve had on my team/company/customers in the form of bullet points.
Check out the example below:
Resume Bullet Point Grammar & Writing Tools
Here’s a list of more tools that will help you create amazing bullet points!
Wordtune: This tool will help you reword and rephrase sentences.
Grammarly: This is an OG grammar tool! It points out simple grammar mistakes and suggests synonyms.
Hemingway Editor: Do you ever wish you could write like Hemingway? Yeah me neither. BUT, Mr. Hemingway was on to something. He believed that all writing should be clear and concise, and this tool was developed to help you do just that.