How Many Bullet Points per Job on Resume: A Superior Guide

Bullet Points for Various Experience Levels

Let’s face it: those of us who are in the early stages of our lives simply won’t have as much to talk about as those who are 20 years into their career paths. This is bound to have an impact on the way you structure your resume, all the way from your job responsibilities to potentially adding hobbies & interests.

However, it’s important to note that even if you don’t have any prior experience, you should still add some job bullet points! It might sound weird, but we’ll talk you through it.

Let’s go over the perfect approach to this part of your resume depending on your experience level.

Entry-level positions

Starting your career can be tough for a thousand different reasons, but crafting the perfect resume is something that might feel like your first real roadblock. (Fortunately, a resume builder can help.)

The most common problem faced by people applying to entry-level roles is that they often feel like there’s nothing to talk about. The end result is often a pretty barebones resume or, conversely, one that’s overloaded with information.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do either. Here are some key tips for filling out your job responsibilities for entry-level roles:

• Think outside the box. You have more experience than you think. Internships, coursework, volunteering, and hobby projects all count if you don’t have much in the way of past work experience.
• Don’t overdo it. Despite the above, be a little picky. Not everything needs to go on your resume. Stick to the things that are relevant. For instance, if you’re applying to work at a dog daycare center, discuss your experience in walking dogs and working with customers, but you can skip your coursework in robotics.
• Be descriptive. In entry-level roles, it’s more important than ever to get into the nitty-gritty of what you did so that the employer can have more of an idea of your past responsibilities. For example, instead of saying that you “volunteered at a senior care facility,” try “Provided companionship and assistance with ADLs to 18 patients, ensuring complete adherence to facility rules.”
• Use numbers. Adding some context to your past achievements, such as using percentages, is a great way to make them stand out. However, if you’re new, you may not always have percentages that show how you improved something. Instead, just make sure to add some numbers, such as by replacing “Wrote Excel scripts for data science class” with “Created over 30 Excel scripts for data science class, enhancing data analysis efficiency by over 20%.”

Aim for the standard 4-6 bullet points per entry, but if you’re struggling to hit that number, 2-3 bullet points will do fine.

Mid-level positions

Once you’ve got some experience under your belt, the number of job responsibility bullet points to include changes. There’s hardly ever an excuse to go under 4 per job now, but of course, like with many things in life, there will be some exceptions.

Since you no longer need to scramble for things to add to your resume, you may find yourself with a different problem—overabundance. While that’s a good problem to have, you still need to make sure that your resume outline remains concise at just one page.

Aim to hit that sweet spot of 4 to 6 bullet points per job, but don’t forget to follow our tips, too:

• Pick relevant experience. If you’re new to the field and are mostly listing unrelated jobs, think of bullet points that show you possess the key skills for the role. If there’s not much overlap, you can still mention those less relevant jobs, but stick to 2 bullet points each that truly emphasize common responsibilities or abilities.
• Focus on accomplishments. Applying for mid-level roles means that you often can’t get away with talking about things that happened years ago, such as your old coursework. Instead, pinpoint some of your best achievements from previous roles and put those bullet points front and center, complete with quantifiable metrics—percentages, numbers, and so on.
• Emphasize your most relevant job. You’ll often want to use the reverse chronological resume format, putting your most recent job at the top. It’s a good idea to deck that role out with more bullet points. In some cases, it’s okay to go above 6 points, but usually, 6 points are enough to exhaust your biggest achievements and give recruiters a good idea of what you’re capable of.

Here’s an idea of how this might look in your own resume:

Senior or leadership positions

It’s safe to say that you’ve been around the block a few times by now. You’re a seasoned employee, either with robust experience in your field, in leadership, or even in both.

Your resume will have recruiters drooling over it, so you’re in luck—but there are ways to maximize the number of responses that you receive. As always, job experience bullet points play a crucial role in your success.

For related jobs, you’ll want to go for anywhere between 4 and 6 bullet points, but if you feel that doesn’t adequately cover your accomplishments, you can go up to 8. Remember that your resume should still fit onto a single page if possible, so it’s impractical to break that “4 to 6” rule for more than that one, career-defining job.

As you pick and choose among your vast experiences, don’t forget our tips!

• Get strategic. There’s no way you can include all of your accomplishments in your resume, so you need to get a little strategic. Let the job description be your guide and include up to 6 super relevant bullet points that perfectly satisfy the requirements.
• Focus on leadership. Even if you’re not applying to be a manager, it’s good to highlight past experiences when you took ownership of something—be it a project or a team. Save a couple of bullet points for that, as it expresses your capability in your field.
• Pick the right jobs. You may have had more than two or three jobs in your field, and the more you add, the more dangerously close you’ll be to breaking that one-page limit for your resume. Load up your two most recent roles with bullet points, but either omit past jobs or just mention them with a couple of points each.

Here are some bullet points that might appear in the resume of a professional of your level, with a strong focus on quantifiable metrics.

Crafting Effective Resume Bullet Points

When writing your resume, you might be tempted to just briefly describe what you did. For example, if you worked in hospitality, you could say that you waited tables and call it a day.

Why? Because there are many, many more effective ways of showing that you’re the best candidate out there. In this section, we’ll explore everything you need to know about writing the best resume bullet points!

Paragraphs or bullet points on resumes?

When creating a resume, bullet points are your friends. They’re much easier to read, tend to stand out more, and help you cover more information with fewer words.

Considering that your resume needs to be reasonably short, using paragraphs in place of bullet points is not practical at all. In fact, the only paragraph you might want to include is a career summary or career objective—everything else belongs in bullet points.

Want a visual? Here’s an example of a job responsibility section written in paragraph form.

• I was a junior software engineer. My main duties included writing code, preparing documentation, attending meetings, designing websites, and debugging. I worked with people from other departments, including quality assurance and user experience.

Now, let’s tackle this with bullet points:

• Wrote and maintained code for 10+ software projects, ensuring functionality and performance
• Prepared comprehensive documentation for 8 software applications, enhancing team understanding and facilitating smoother project handovers
• Attended and contributed to 15+ team meetings per month, collaborating on project planning and issue resolution
• Designed and developed 12 responsive websites, improving user interface and experience
• Identified and fixed bugs in 100+ software modules, increasing system stability
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams, including quality assurance and user experience, to ensure seamless integration and high-quality software delivery

See which one sounds more impactful? That’s the one to go for.

Emphasizing accomplishments

When you read job descriptions, you’re always presented with a list of responsibilities that the new employer has planned out for you. Let’s say that as a waiter, you’d be expected to keep things tidy, attend to customers, and maybe sell more menu items.

If you’ve done this job before, you might think that the best way to get it again is to just list those exact responsibilities to prove that you can do it. However, listing responsibilities instead of accomplishments is actually not a great idea.

By framing your responsibilities as accomplishments, you’re making your resume so much more impactful. You’re not just telling your future employer what you can do—you’re telling them what you have done and what you achieved in your past roles.

Doing this might feel tricky if you’re not used to it, but in reality, almost every responsibility can be turned into an accomplishment. Let’s figure this out.

Responsibilities:

• Washed dishes
• Waited tables
• Assigned shifts
• Sold menu items
• Assisted customers

See how that looks kind of generic? Many jobs would rather hear how you were able to improve things in your past roles.

• Maintained cleanliness by washing dishes, ensuring a hygienic kitchen environment and reducing health inspection issues by 5%
• Efficiently waited tables, providing excellent customer service and increasing tips by 33%
• Assigned shifts to staff, optimizing workforce efficiency and reducing labor costs by 10%
• Effectively sold additional menu items, increasing daily sales revenue by 3% through upselling techniques
• Assisted customers promptly, enhancing customer satisfaction and contributing to a 30% increase in repeat business

With accomplishments, you take ownership of your tasks and give the reader insight into how your work and skills affected the bottom line at your past jobs.

Leveraging action verbs

You know how we just mentioned taking ownership of your tasks? That’s actually a key component of a winning resume, and you can incorporate it by adding action verbs to your bullet points.

This is a powerful way to convey initiative and results. These action verbs make your accomplishments stand out and show off that coveted so-called “proactive” approach. Let’s not forget that they make your resume dynamic and far more engaging.

With action verbs, assuming that your resume makes it past AI-based applicant tracking systems (which we’ll help you with below!), it’ll have a much higher chance of being read in full by a human. From there, you’re just a hop and a skip away from an interview.

To really show you how useful action verbs are, we’ll start with something that doesn’t have any. Here’s an example of responsibilities, sans accomplishments and action verbs:

• Was responsible for writing code
• Attended meetings
• Helped with debugging
• Worked on designing websites

That will not do. Let’s take a look at some powerful action verbs that you can use to add some spice to your resume:

• Achieved
• Improved
• Managed
• Led
• Designed
• Developed
• Implemented
• Streamlined
• Coordinated
• Increased
• Enhanced
• Directed
• Executed
• Generated
• Optimized

Now, let’s put those verbs to work! Here are a few examples to show you how they really transform something somewhat dull into something that will have recruiters falling over themselves to call you.

• Architected scalable backend systems, reducing server response time by 31% and increasing application performance
• Spearheaded the migration of legacy code to modern frameworks, improving code maintainability and reducing technical debt by 27%
• Automated deployment pipelines using CI/CD tools, cutting deployment time by 59% and minimizing production downtime

Importance of numbers and metrics

Aside from a resume builder and a cover letter generator, who are your best friends on your job-seeking journey? You might be surprised to hear that they’re just numbers.

Financial figures, percentages, and other types of data are all the best ways to make your resume pop—so much so that we never recommend sending out a resume without quantifiable impact.

Quantifiable impact refers to various ways in which you can show future employers what you were able to achieve. It’s one thing to tell them that you’ve taught high schoolers all about chemistry, but it’s another thing entirely to say that during the course of your career, you’ve worked with well over 300 teens, and that 7 of them went on to win national competitions. That is pretty huge.

While the above is just an example, it perfectly illustrates why numbers and metrics are so important. Other than making your achievements more tangible, adding quantifiable impact also simply makes that part of your resume more visible—which is exactly what you want.

Here are some ways you could lean into numbers and metrics in your bullet points:

• Improved student test scores by 29% over 1 academic year by developing engaging lesson plans and hands-on laboratory experiments
• Performed over 300 successful neurosurgical procedures annually, achieving a 98% patient recovery rate
• Increased social media engagement by 113% and follower count by 39% in 6 months through targeted content strategies and campaigns
• Edited and proofread over 1,000 articles per year, reducing errors by 89% and improving readability, increasing publication acceptance rates by 19%

Use relevant keywords

As we delve deeper into making the perfect resume, using relevant keywords becomes increasingly important. Many companies today rely on ATS for the initial screening of resumes. Some data suggests that up to 98.8% of Fortune 500 companies rely on ATS, and this is an industry-wide trend.

You know what they say: If you can’t beat them, join them. Instead of trying to find that needle in a haystack—or, in other words, a company that somehow doesn’t use ATS—it’s better to optimize your resume to get past those initial checks.

Using keywords is one way to do it. Start by adding keywords from the job description, such as all the relevant skills that you possess. Next, make sure that your resume bullet points also feature some of those keywords.

In order to figure out the right keywords to use, read different job listings and make lists. We’ll give you some examples of the type of thing to look for in different industries.

SaaS

• Cloud computing
• API integration
• DevOps
• Agile
• Product management
• Customer onboarding
• Data security
• Subscription management
• UX design
• SDLC
• Multi-tenant architecture
• SLAs
• Scalability

Marketing

• SEO
• Content marketing
• Social media strategy
• Email campaigns
• Market research
• Brand management
• PPC advertising
• Customer segmentation
• Analytics and reporting
• Lead generation
• Marketing automation
• CRM
• Influencer marketing
• Copywriting
• Public relations

Finance

• Financial analysis
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Risk management
• Auditing
• Tax compliance
• Investment strategies
• Portfolio management
• Financial reporting
• Cash flow management
• M&A
• Cost reduction
• Regulatory compliance
• Financial modeling
• Credit analysis
• Asset management

Demonstrating Career Progression

Every company likes growth, which is why most of them also try to recruit people who want to grow alongside their colleagues.

This is why so many interviewers will ask you about your 5-year plan, or present the dreaded “why should we hire you” question. They want to know that you’re on the same page and aiming upward just like they are.

Whether this is your first job or your fifth, there’s a clear way to demonstrate growth and development through your bullet points. Your resume format comes in handy here.

By using the reverse chronological format, with your latest job right at the top, you’ll take recruiters on a trip around your career.

To really showcase how much you’ve learned, highlight your entry-level roles and move on to mid- and senior-level jobs. Pick the right bullet points that show how much your responsibilities and achievements have changed over the years.

Let’s take a look at the bullet points shown on the resume of someone who works in accounting.

Entry-level accountant

• Processed daily transactions and maintained accurate financial records, reducing errors in monthly financial reports by 19%

Accounting specialist

• Led a team of 5 junior accountants in performing quarterly audits, improving compliance and accuracy of financial statements by 27%

Accounting manager

• Implemented new accounting software across the department, enhancing efficiency and reducing processing time by 49%

Optimizing Your Resume for ATS

We cannot emphasize this enough: optimizing your resume for applicant tracking systems (ATS) is the key to being hired. The more attention you pay to this aspect, the likelier you are to get a callback.

With that said, we’ve covered keywords, but there’s one more facet of ATS that’s worth considering: formatting your resume.

To make sure that your application doesn’t get overlooked, check out our tips:

• Stick to standard bullet points
• Don’t use unusual fonts
• Make sure that all your bullet points are relevant to the role
• Add 8 to 12 skills that are highly job-specific
• Keep your resume at one page
• Use standard headings to help ATS understand your resume structure, such as “Skills” and “Experience”
• Avoid images, graphics, and tables
• Be consistent in your formatting
• Use a resume builder and/or resume templates to bypass the ATS

With these tips, your resume will be ready to be seen by AI, and in turn—human recruiters.