Action verbs for a resume, with a real bullet for each

How to use action verbs on a resume

Open each bullet with the most specific verb that is true: "cut" or "rebuilt" says more than "worked on" or "responsible for". Use the past tense for past roles and the present for the job you hold now.

Vary the verbs down a page, but never at the cost of accuracy: a reader trusts "ran" over "spearheaded" when that is what happened.

Verbs for leading people and work

• Ran (43 bullets): “Ran the brand’s first television and video-on-demand burst on a £2.1M budget; measured sales uplift paid it back 1.7 times inside the year.” (Brand Manager)
• Led (27 bullets): “Led 40 web and API penetration tests for finance and health clients, two of them under intelligence-led red-team rules.” (Application Security Engineer)
• Trained (17 bullets): “Trained 26 site leads on the new visit-tracking workflow, taking same-day chart closure from 62% to 91%.” (Business Intelligence Analyst)
• Managed (8 bullets): “Managed teams of five and ran the recruiting loop that hired 11 analysts in a year.” (Chief of Staff)
• Hired (4 bullets): “Hired and trained six analysts, four of whom now lead teams of their own.” (Head of Data)
• Coordinated (3 bullets): “Coordinated Christmas point-of-sale across 600 stores, delivered on time and 12% under budget.” (Brand Manager)
• Owned (3 bullets): “Owned revenue and inventory sections on 14 manufacturing and retail audits under FRS 102, on engagements up to £220m of turnover.” (Investment Banking Analyst)
• Supervised (3 bullets): “Supervised three B.Tech project students through their column studies, two of whom presented at a national conference.” (Research Associate)

Verbs for building and making

• Built (77 bullets): “Built the churn scorecard customer success still works from; accounts in its top decile churned at six times the base rate.” (Analytics Engineer)
• Wrote (49 bullets): “Wrote the territory account plan that eight reps now work from; new-hire ramp fell from seven months to four.” (Account Executive)
• Rebuilt (43 bullets): “Rebuilt the cold-call opener around one question about dispatch delays, lifting connect-to-meeting rate from 9% to 16%.” (Account Executive)
• Designed (23 bullets): “Designed the retest process that replaced a full re-engagement, cutting client cost by a third and closing findings a fortnight sooner.” (Application Security Engineer)
• Set (18 bullets): “Set up the baseline profiles and macrobenchmark run that keep p90 cold start under 1.2s; a regression now fails the build.” (Android Engineer)
• Delivered (17 bullets): “Delivered 31 identity projects for restaurants, direct-to-consumer beauty and two non-profits; twelve clients returned for a second engagement.” (Brand Designer)
• Introduced (17 bullets): “Introduced source contract tests, taking silent schema breaks from roughly two a month to none across the last three quarters.” (Analytics Engineer)
• Redesigned (11 bullets): “Redesigned the pack after 12 shopper sessions; the time taken to find the range on shelf in eye-tracking tests fell from 4.4 to 2.9 seconds.” (Brand Manager)
• Drafted (8 bullets): “Drafted internal audit reports for a 40-branch retail chain, documenting cash-handling gaps at seven branches that were closed within the quarter.” (Audit Associate)
• Modeled (7 bullets): “Modeled the subscription funnel end to end and showed that 31% of trials never reached the first integration step, which drove an onboarding rewrite.” (Analytics Engineer)
• Launched (6 bullets): “Launched the online parts store that now takes 29% of orders and cut quote turnaround from two days to 20 minutes.” (Director of Strategy)
• Produced (6 bullets): “Produced electrical designs for 40 primary-care refurbishments, each delivered inside a six-week survey-to-issue window.” (Electrical Design Engineer)
• Started (6 bullets): “Started an internal newsletter now read by 84% of staff, retiring an all-hands slide deck that 9% of them opened.” (Communications Manager)
• Shipped (5 bullets): “Shipped the podcast download queue, taking offline listening from 4% to 22% of sessions.” (Android Engineer)
• Modelled (4 bullets): “Modelled and checked 60 reinforced-concrete transfer beams for a nine-storey residential scheme, clearing every one through internal review without a resubmission.” (Graduate Structural Engineer)
• Opened (4 bullets): “Opened four dark stores and two sortation centres, each reaching planned throughput within six weeks of first dispatch.” (Head of Operations)

Verbs for improving a result

• Cut (70 bullets): “Cut median sales cycle from 94 days to 61 by moving the security review to week two instead of the week before signature.” (Account Executive)
• Replaced (28 bullets): “Replaced 60 hand-maintained SQL views with a tested dbt project, ending a standing Monday ritual of patching broken reports.” (Analytics Engineer)
• Grew (17 bullets): “Grew value share from 4.1% to 6.3% in 24 months while three own-label ranges entered the category, holding price at a 14% premium.” (Brand Manager)
• Automated (13 bullets): “Automated weekly campaign reporting across six channels, returning about 15 hours a month to the media team.” (Analytics Engineer)
• Moved (11 bullets): “Moved attribution from last click to a position-based model, reallocating
  80,000 of quarterly spend toward two undercredited channels.” (Analytics Engineer)
• Brought (9 bullets): “Brought app size from 61MB to 24MB with dynamic feature modules, which lifted install completion 9% on prepaid devices.” (Android Engineer)
• Raised (8 bullets): “Raised average contract value from $41k to $67k by leading with the scheduling module that every won deal in 2023 had in common.” (Account Executive)
• Lifted (7 bullets): “Lifted gross renewal from 81% to 94% in two years by replacing ad-hoc onboarding with a fixed ninety-day plan and one named success milestone per account.” (Customer Success Manager)
• Reduced (7 bullets): “Reduced standby draw from 18mA to 0.7mA on an industrial gateway, taking field battery life from five months to four years.” (Embedded Software Engineer)
• Recovered (5 bullets): “Recovered $58,000 in denied insurance claims in two years by tracking denial reasons nobody had recorded before.” (Junior Data Analyst)
• Consolidated (4 bullets): “Consolidated four legacy ledgers onto one ERP instance on schedule, retiring
  80k a year of maintenance on the systems replaced.” (Financial Controller)
• Turned (3 bullets): “Turned a stalled reseller channel into 22% of personal bookings by running monthly joint pipeline reviews with three regional partners.” (Account Executive)

Verbs for finding and deciding

• Traced (8 bullets): “Traced a ₹1.2 crore revenue cut-off misstatement to despatch records at two plants; the client restated before the audit report was signed.” (Audit Associate)
• Found (5 bullets): “Found that an overlapping join double-counted 11% of no-show appointments; the corrected rate of 17% changed how three clinics staffed Fridays.” (Business Intelligence Analyst)
• Analysed (3 bullets): “Analysed 18 months of panel data to delist two SKUs and back a third, taking £310k of trade spend off products that would never repay it.” (Brand Manager)
• Mapped (2 bullets): “Mapped 31 km of distribution main in QGIS from field notes the utility had kept only on paper.” (Research Associate)
• Reviewed (2 bullets): “Reviewed 1,200 financial promotions a year against the conduct rules and stopped 47 before publication.” (Compliance Officer)
• Tested (2 bullets): “Tested the record-import path against 14 malformed real-world files and found three crashes that had already reached production twice.” (QA Automation Engineer)

Verbs for winning and persuading

• Closed (11 bullets): “Closed $3.2M in new ARR against a