Article contents
Open any CV at random and read the "experience" section: you will almost always find phrases like "schedule management", "customer follow-up", "participation in cross-functional projects". They describe a job, not a contribution. Yet a recruiter doesn't hire a job description; they hire someone who has moved things forward.
This guide shows you how to go from one to the other, with simple formulas and realistic examples.
Duty or achievement: the difference
- A duty answers "what do people do in this role?".
- An achievement answers "what changed because of you?".
| Duty | Achievement |
|---|---|
| Stock management | Reorganised storage areas: 15% less order-picking time |
| Customer reminders | Introduced a day-7 reminder: late payments down 20% |
| Team leadership | Managed 8 people; staff turnover cut from 25% to 12% in one year |
| Article writing | 40 articles published; blog traffic doubled in 8 months |
The figures above are fictional: they show the form, they are not meant to be copied.
The basic formula: Action + Context + Result
For each bullet point, ask three questions:
- What did I do? An action verb, in the past tense or the infinitive, depending on your CV's style.
- In what context? Team size, volume, constraint, tool.
- What was the effect? Time, money, quality or satisfaction gained.
Example: "Set up a weekly dashboard (Excel) to track delivery delays: on-time delivery rate rose from 82% to 91% in six months."
Action verbs that say something
Replace "responsible for" or "in charge of" with a verb that shows what you actually did:
- Create, launch, set up for what you started.
- Reduce, improve, optimise, simplify for what you made better.
- Lead, coordinate, manage for what you directed.
- Negotiate, convince, retain for relationships.
- Analyse, diagnose, audit for investigative work.
Avoid repeating the same verb throughout your CV, and prefer the precise verb over the adjective.
Which numbers should you use?
Think about six families of measures:
- Money: budget managed, revenue generated, savings made.
- Volume: number of customers, cases, orders, items per day.
- Time: shorter lead time, faster cycle, hours saved.
- Quality: error rate, satisfaction rate, return rate.
- Size: team managed, geographic scope, number of sites.
- Growth: change over a given period, before and after.
A number should be true, defensible in an interview and comparable ("in six months", "out of 200 cases"). Don't round it up in your favour: a recruiter will ask "how did you measure that?".
What if I don't have any numbers?
This is the case in many professions: support work, healthcare, teaching, administration. Several options exist.
- Use orders of magnitude: "about 40 calls a day", "a team of 6", "3 sites". They give the scale without claiming absolute precision.
- Ask a former colleague or manager: a figure you had forgotten may come back to you.
- Look through your documents: dashboards, meeting notes, annual reviews, congratulatory emails.
- Describe a before and after without numbers: "Created an onboarding procedure for new hires, now used by the whole department."
- Cite a form of recognition: "Appointed go-to person for training new recruits" says something without a single number.
If nothing is truly measurable, stay factual. A simple, true sentence beats an invented figure.
Before and after examples by situation
Customer service
Before: "Handling customer complaints."
After: "Handled 30 to 40 complaints a day (phone and email); resolved 7 in 10 at first contact, after writing template replies validated with the quality team."
Project management
Before: "Coordinating cross-functional projects."
After: "Coordinated a migration to a new invoicing tool across 4 departments; delivered on time despite a 10% budget cut mid-project."
Teaching or training
Before: "Running training courses."
After: "Delivered 25 training sessions a year to groups of 10 to 15 adults; average satisfaction score of 4.6/5 on end-of-session questionnaires."
First job or internship
Before: "Helping the marketing team."
After: "Wrote 12 newsletters for a list of 5,000 subscribers; tested two subject lines, raising the open rate by 3 points."
How many bullet points per role?
- Recent or highly relevant role: 4 to 6 bullet points.
- Older role (more than 10 years ago): 1 to 2 bullet points, or a single line.
- Role unrelated to the target job: 1 to 2 bullet points focused on what transfers.
Order the bullets by relevance to the job posting, not by internal chronology. The most convincing one comes first.
Proofreading an experience: four questions
- Could this sentence appear on someone else's CV? If so, it is too vague.
- Does it start with a precise action verb?
- Is there a number, a context or a result?
- Is it linked to the target job? If not, remove it or shorten it.
Common mistakes
- Stacking numbers: too many percentages in one line make it hard to read. One or two per bullet is enough.
- Forgetting the "we": if the result is collective, say so ("as part of a team of 5") and specify your share.
- Exaggerating: an overstatement quickly unravels in an interview or during a reference check.
- Mixing tenses: current job in the present, former jobs in the past, or everything in the infinitive, but consistently.
Key takeaways
Your experience is not a list of obligations: it tells what you can do in a given context. A few well-chosen lines, each with a strong verb and something concrete, weigh more than a page of generalities. Once this work is done, adjust the order of your bullets for each posting: that is the subject of our article on tailoring your CV to a job posting. And for the overall structure, see how to write a CV in 2026.
