Resume guides

Writing a professional summary and strong bullet points

Two parts of your Résumé do most of the persuading: the summary at the top and the first three bullets of your current role. Everything else is corroboration.

The summary formula

[Role] with [X] years in [domain/industry]. Specialised in [two or three capabilities from the posting]. [One quantified achievement]. Looking to [what you will do for this employer].

Example: "Operations manager with 8 years in e-commerce logistics. Specialised in warehouse automation and 3PL contract negotiation. Cut cost per shipment by 18% across three EU hubs. Now looking to scale fulfilment for a growing DTC brand."

• Three to four lines. Never a paragraph block.
• Written in third person without pronouns, or first person without 'I' — pick one and stay consistent.
• Rewritten for each application. It is the cheapest tailoring you can do.

Bullet points: the CAR pattern

Challenge, Action, Result — compressed into one line. Lead with the verb, end with the number.

Verbs that do work

Built, launched, negotiated, reduced, consolidated, automated, recovered, scaled, standardised, mentored. Avoid assisted, helped, participated, was responsible for — they place you next to the work rather than in it.

How many bullets per role

• Current or most recent role: four to six bullets.
• Previous role: three to four.
• Anything older than eight years: one to two, or a single grouped line.

Summaries for three common situations

The formula above assumes a straightforward continuation of your current path. Three situations need a small adjustment, and getting them wrong is one of the most common summary mistakes.

Career changer: [Role you are targeting], bringing [X] years in [previous field] and [transferable skill]. Built [proof point, ideally a project or certification in the new field]. Seeking to apply [core strength] to [new domain]. Returning after a break: [Role] with [X] years across [domain], most recently [what you did during the break: freelance, courses, volunteering]. [One durable achievement from before the break]. Ready to bring [core skill] back to a full-time [target role]. Senior/leadership: [Title] with [X] years leading [team size/function]. Known for [one distinctive strength, e.g. turnarounds, scaling teams]. [One organisation-level result, not an individual task]. Looking to lead [type of team/mandate] at [type of company].

Common mistakes in summaries and bullets

• Opening the summary with a soft trait ('Passionate, dedicated professional') instead of a role and years of experience.
• Writing bullets as a list of tools used rather than what the tools accomplished.
• Repeating the same achievement in both the summary and a bullet point word-for-word, wasting space that could cover different evidence.
• Using a number without context, such as 'Increased sales by 20%' with no timeframe or baseline, which reads as unverifiable.
• Ending bullets with a period-less fragment that trails off instead of a complete, specific claim.

Rewriting a bullet in five steps

1. Write the honest, unpolished version first: what you actually did, in plain language.
2. Identify the verb and replace any weak opener (helped, worked on, was involved in) with an action verb.
3. Add scale: how many people, how much money, how many units or clients.
4. Add the result: what changed, and by how much, ideally with a before and after figure.
5. Cut the sentence until only the verb, the specific action and the number remain.

When you genuinely have no number to give

Some roles produce outcomes that are real but hard to count — a policy analyst's recommendation, a teacher's classroom management, a designer's visual system. In these cases, replace a missing number with a specific, checkable detail: who used the work, how often, or what decision it fed into. 'Reduced churn by 12%' and 'the recommendation was adopted as department policy across four regional offices' are both concrete, even though only one has a percentage.

Summary length by seniority

• Entry-level: two to three lines, weighted toward coursework, projects and internships rather than years of experience you do not yet have.
• Mid-career: three to four lines, one clear specialisation and one number.
• Senior or executive: four lines maximum, with at least one result stated at the organisational level rather than the individual task level.

Common bullet-writing traps in technical roles

• Naming the tool but not the problem it solved — 'Used Python and SQL' says nothing without an outcome attached.
• Describing a system's complexity instead of your contribution to it, which reads as background rather than achievement.
• Reporting a metric that improved for reasons outside your control, without noting your specific role in the change.
• Skipping context that a non-specialist reader needs, such as the size of the dataset or the scale of the system, which makes an impressive result look ordinary.

A last check on the whole block

Read your summary and your top three bullets together, out loud, as if reading someone else's résumé. If any sentence could be copied onto a stranger's résumé without anyone noticing, it needs a more specific detail — a number, a name, a scale, or a result unique to what you actually did.