The essentials in 30 seconds
- 01Always open with a past-tense verb.
- 02One figure per achievement, honest even if approximate.
- 03Lead with the achievements closest to the advert.
01
Duty versus achievement
Duty: “Customer service.” Achievement: “Served 90 customers a shift while holding a 4.8 out of 5 average rating.” The first describes your contract; the second describes your performance.
02
The formula
Action verb + what you did + measurable result. “Reorganised the warehouse, cutting order picking time by 25%.” No exact figure? Use honest magnitudes: units per day, people managed, budget handled.
03
Where the numbers come from
Volume (customers, orders, tickets), time (minutes saved, deadlines met), money (sales, savings, budget), quality (errors, ratings, incidents) and team (people trained or coordinated).
04
Three to five per role
Past five, nobody reads them. Order by impact and put the most impressive one first.
05
Why duties don't convince and achievements do
A duty describes what the employer asked of you; an achievement describes what the employer got because you were there. The recruiter already knows what an administrator or a waiter does — what they don't know is whether you did it well. That's the information that earns the call, and it only appears when a result carries a magnitude.
There's a practical reason too: quantified achievements are the only part of a CV nobody else can write. Ten candidates word “customer service” identically; none of them matches you on “cut average wait time from 12 minutes to 7 by restructuring the bar shift”.
06
The formula, and how to apply it to a job with no metrics
The formula is past-tense verb + what you did + measurable result, in one line of two rows at most. If the result was never recorded anywhere, rebuild it from honest magnitudes: volume handled, time saved, money managed, errors avoided, people coordinated. A reasoned estimate you can defend in an interview is valid information; a duty with no data isn't.
These are the five wells of numbers you can always draw from, and nearly every role has at least three.
- Volume: customers per shift, orders per day, cases a month, tickets closed.
- Time: minutes per transaction, deadlines met, days cut from a cycle.
- Money: sales, debt recovered, purchasing savings, budget managed.
- Quality: error rate, average rating, complaints, returns.
- Team: people trained, shifts coordinated, interns supervised.
07
Three full rewrites
Before: “Customer service in store.” After: “Served an average of 120 customers a day in peak season, holding a 4.7 average on in-store surveys.”
Before: “Responsible for stock control.” After: “Reorganised a 2,400-line inventory, cutting stockouts from 18 to 5 incidents a month.”
Before: “Assisted with payroll.” After: “Ran the monthly 140-employee payroll cycle in two days, with no closing errors across 14 months.”
08
How many, in what order, and how to prioritise per advert
Three to five achievements per role, ordered by impact. The first line of each job is the only one always read, so that's where the strongest achievement goes — the one closest to what the advert asks. For roles more than ten years old, a single line is enough.
When you switch adverts, don't rewrite: reorder. The same role can lead with the sales result for a commercial advert and with the error-reduction result for an operations one, without changing a word.
Check this before you send it
- Every line opens with a past-tense verb.
- At least three achievements on page one carry a figure.
- No figure is indefensible in an interview.
- Each role's first achievement is the closest to the advert.
- No two achievements report the same result.
- No achievement runs beyond two rows.
Mistakes that cost you the interview
Opening with “Responsible for”
It dilutes ownership and burns the start of the line, which is the part actually read.
Round percentages with no baseline
“Improved efficiency by 50%” with nothing to measure against undermines the whole block.
More than five achievements per role
Past the fifth, readers give up and the good ones get buried among repeats.
Mixing duty and result in one line
If the sentence opens by explaining the job, the result arrives too late to land.
Frequently asked
Questions we get asked most
- What if I have no figures from my job?
- Rebuild honest magnitudes: customers per shift, orders per day, people managed, budget handled, deadlines met. A reasoned estimate (“around 80 covers a service”) is worth far more than a duty with no data at all.
- How many achievements per role?
- Three to five, ordered by impact. Past the fifth, readers give up, so cut the repeats and keep the strongest achievement on the first line of each job.
- Can I use approximate percentages?
- Yes, as long as you can defend them in an interview. Use honest wording like “around 20%”, or the raw figure (“from 90 days to 38”), which usually reads as more credible than a round percentage.