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I deleted every ‘-ed’ from my résumé, and my callbacks changed
growthmindset ·
When I first wrote my résumé, every line ended the same way. ‘Improved onboarding.’ ‘Wrote landing copy.’ ‘Managed weekly reports.’ I had worked hard, but a recruiter reading it couldn’t see the one thing that mattered: so what changed?
A review made it click. A résumé isn’t a list of what you did. It’s a list of what you left behind.
● Lead with the result, end with the method
Laszlo Bock, who ran People Operations at Google, shared a formula that stuck with me: “Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z].” The order is the trick. You say the outcome (X) and the number that proves it (Y) first, and how you did it (Z) comes last.
So I rewrote mine:
· Improved onboarding
· → Redesigned the new-user onboarding flow, lifting 7-day retention (validated with an A/B test)
● No number? Leave a [?]
The hard part was that I couldn’t always remember the exact figure. Don’t invent one. Leave a placeholder like ‘conversion +[?]%’ and fill it in later once you find the data. If you never find it, a qualitative result works too, like ‘cut repeat support tickets noticeably.’ What matters first is that the sentence ends in a result.
● It comes back to writing things down
My biggest regret was not logging the numbers as they happened. Wins blur with time. So now I jot one line whenever I finish something: what I did, and what moved because of it. Come résumé season, I pick from what I saved instead of squeezing my memory.
— Source: Laszlo Bock, ‘My personal formula for a winning resume’ (LinkedIn) · book: Work Rules! (2015)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140929001534-24454816-my-personal-formula-for-a-better-resume