Strong verbs, no fluff: rewriting your bullets in class
Okay you guys. We've been circling this for a few lessons now — verifiable lines, numbers, household work counting as real experience. Today we actually do the surgery. Bring your draft, because you're rewriting live, in front of me, not taking notes to do later.
Here's the thing about bullet points. Most résumés are full of soft verbs holding up nothing. "Responsible for," "helped with," "worked on," "assisted in." Those verbs don't do any work. They just sit there taking up space while the actual accomplishment hides somewhere behind them.
We're going to hunt those down and replace them.
Step one: circle every weak verb
Get a pen — an actual pen, paper copy — and go through your résumé circling the first word of every bullet. You're looking for the soft ones. Helped. Assisted. Worked. Was responsible for. Participated in. Involved with.
If half your bullets start with one of those, that's normal. That's most résumés. It's also most of the reason résumés get skipped.
Step two: ask what you actually did
For each circled bullet, I want you to answer one question out loud, even if you feel silly: what did you do, specifically, that a stranger could picture?
"Responsible for scheduling" — okay, but what did you do. Did you build the schedule? Did you juggle it when people called in? Did you fix a scheduling mess nobody else could untangle? That's the verb. Built. Untangled. Fixed. Reworked.
I walk the room during this part and I will ask you this question directly about a specific line. I'm not doing it to put you on the spot. I'm doing it because when someone gives me a vague answer back, that's exactly where the weak bullet is hiding. The fix is usually sitting right there in how you explain it out loud — we just have to get it onto the page the same way.
Step three: swap the verb, keep the meat
Once you've got the real verb, rebuild the sentence around it. Strong verb first, specific result after.
- "Responsible for inventory" becomes "Cut inventory costs 12% by renegotiating with two suppliers."
- "Helped train new employees" becomes "Trained six new hires on the register system in their first week."
- "Worked on customer complaints" becomes "Resolved customer complaints, average response time under one hour."
Notice none of these got longer. Some got shorter. That's the goal — tighter and stronger at the same time. Fluff and precision don't usually coexist on the same line.
A short list of verbs that actually work
I'm not going to hand you fifty verbs to memorize, that's busywork. But if you're stuck, these are ones I use over and over because they're specific and they're honest: built, cut, trained, managed, resolved, launched, negotiated, reduced, increased, coordinated, redesigned, tracked.
Notice "coordinated" is on there and it's doing real work — that's the same word we used a couple lessons ago for the household stuff. Running five kids' schedules and a budget is coordination, full stop. Say it that way.
My honest opinion on this
Here's my opinion, and you can take it or leave it — every single line on your résumé should be something a stranger could verify. Not "hard worker." Hard worker is worthless. Nobody can check it, nobody believes it, and it tells the hiring manager nothing about what you'd actually do in the job. If a line doesn't have a number or a specific fact in it, either rework it or cut it. I'd rather you have six strong lines than fourteen soft ones.
A word on how far to cut
When I rebuilt my own résumé the first time — this was during the stretch when things were tight and I really needed callbacks — I sat down with it three separate times before it was done. It had fifteen years of stuff piled onto it, one job added after another, nothing ever taken off. By the time I was through, I'd thrown out two-thirds of it. The version that finally got me a callback was under one page.
I still have a photo of the old four-page version on my phone. I show people sometimes just so they can see what four pages of soft verbs and no specifics actually looks like next to the page that worked. It's not a flattering photo of a résumé, but that's the point.
So don't be precious about length right now. If a bullet doesn't survive the "what did you actually do" question, it doesn't survive. You're not losing your work history. You're just refusing to let it hide behind weak language anymore.
A caution
Don't invent numbers you don't have. If you genuinely don't know the percentage or the count, use a real range or a true statement instead — "reduced wait times noticeably" beats a made-up 27% that falls apart if someone asks you about it in an interview. Verifiable doesn't mean fabricated. It means true and specific.
Before next time
Finish circling and rewriting every bullet on your current draft, not just the ones we got to in class. Bring the rewritten version next time — we're going to read it out loud again and see how it sounds now.