Crafting Your Bullet Points

All of the formatting advice provided in the other sections for ATS and human reviewers should naturally lead whatever or whoever is reading your resume to the bullet points they care about the most. At this point what’s left is to wow the resume screener with your experiences driving positive impact and your technical ability.

For this section I’ll start with some common mistakes to avoid:

• List accomplishments and impact, not your tasks and responsibilities
• Talk about your personal achievements, not your team’s
• Highlight your best projects and feats. Do not just list everything

A common mistake people make is listing their tasks and responsibilities in their bullet points instead of their greatest achievements or how they made outsized impact while in their role. Here are some examples of bad bullet points which just list duties:

• “Used agile practices to collaborate with software engineers, product managers, and designers to complete technical projects”
• “Addressed customer JIRAs by fixing bugs and improving product reliability in a timely manner”
• “Built and delivered medium to large scale features within product deadlines”

Such details describe the role you are in (as if it is a job description), but do not provide any details about your impact on the team. Some examples of good bullet points are provided in this article about Google’s X-Y-Z formula.

Another common mistake is when a resume lists the achievements of the team, and not the individual. This is most easily avoided by not including any achievements that require “we”/”our” pronouns. And avoiding bullet points such as:

• “Collaborated in a team to build a new feature that increased usage by 27%”

Recruiters and hiring managers are interested in your accomplishments, not your team’s. So you should include only your personal accomplishments.

The last common mistake is putting too many bullet points and without proper thought to order. You should make sure to include only your greatest accomplishments, in order of greatness from top to bottom. This will maximize the chances of your best feats being read and considered by a recruiter or hiring manager.