Something so small and simple – yet often done without communicating the power right to the point. Let’s change that for you!
Everyone knows to add some bullet joints to your latest job experience. But how exactly? This is something I work with every client on, and I want to empower you for free to get these hacks and really stand out in your applications.
Structure each job timeline entry into:
WHAT > Responsibilities
HOW > Methods, your style
FOR WHAT > Results
Example:
Career Coach – Women in Digital, February 2022 – Present
Self-employed, Berlin, Germany
• Inspired by the belief that every woman has a unique career magic, I set out to bring about a little ripple of change in the digital world to a more feminine work environment.
• Crafted a coaching approach that’s close to my heart, ensuring every woman felt seen and supported.
How I did this:
• Listened deeply during 1:1 sessions, letting their stories guide the coaching path.
• Introducing a lot of FUN in a proces smost people judge as boring and dreadful.
Achievements:
• Coached 25 women to achieve their dream jobs with 100% positive reviews
• Produced five innovative free resources to support woman help themselves
STRONG WORDINGS
• unified
• beginning with a verb
• avoiding weak verbs
• 1 point per line
• short
Strong, unique action verbs show hiring managers that you have held different roles and skill sets, and makes your resume more impactful.
Extra credit: Pick the action verbs from the job ad! Use their language!
Useful list: https://resumeworded.com/action-verbs
QUANTIFY
Scope: Consider budget size, team size, impacted users/customers, and total projects managed.
Time: Highlight time saved, project duration, early completions, and efficiency compared to benchmarks.
Efficiency: Capture increased productivity percentages, resource savings, and tool/process implementation benefits.
Comparison: Showcase improvements over past work or outcomes.
Quantifiable Achievements: Back results with numbers, percentages, or qualitative outcomes.
Overall Impact: Optionally, emphasize the broader business impact.
Example:
• Built a team to 5 FTEs for SEO, Analytics, Marketing, and Automation/CRM in three countries during COVID.
• Drove the agency’s expansion across Europe, elevating the strategic consultancy unit, with a notable €5+ million in global project volume over 3 years.
• Secured Executive Harmony: Liaised to resolve conflicts between two executive members, resulting in a decisive organizational change that upheld company values.
As a basis, go back to your CV
COPY
and do what you normally don’t: write some more infos
(on each job – dont worry about formatting it!
1) WHAT responsibilites
2) HOW you did it
2) RESULTS
Combine all existing versions of your cv: Find all old cvs and versions and put them into one document.
How ChatGPT can help:
I will give you three versions of my work experience section on my CV. I just want to you collapse all information from the 3 versions into one version. Please do NOT change any of the bullet points or add anything.
Interview yourself and relisten to write down the points. Or use an A.I. transcribe and ChatGPT to help e.g. https://otter.ai or simply your dictation function on your phone and a notes app.
Talk about the job in a loose way interviewing yourself with those three questions. This should be around 5-10 minutes. Make sure to include the “what, how, for what/results” in that interview. You can also read out section of your old job descriptions if you find them relevant.
This results in “lots of information” on each job that you can put into ChatGPT:
I want to optimise a time line entry on my CV. This is what is currently looks like:
INSERT EXISTING ENTRY from combined CV
I will now provide you with a lot of information on one job experience I want to show in my timeline summary on my resumé.
Task: Extend the existing entry and restructure it to have three sections with at least 5 bullet points each. The three sections are: 1)WHAT( Description/responsibiltities) 2. HOW (methods, your touch, skills, tools) and 3) RESULTS (Quantified, showing importance).
Here the additional information:
INSERT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
You can do this manually using your brain or get A.I. to help you with this. Here the prompt for it:
The objective: Optimise the bullet points for the job timeline entry. Writing style: In a CV we want to start bullet points with “strong” action verbs. Example: Strong: – Automated, established, tranformed, saved, etc. Weak: – Coordinated, supported, helped, guided
Having this in mind, can you optimise the wording of the timeline entry you just provided to include strong action verbs. Use strong action verbs to start each bullet point, but maintain the original content thereafter for the rest of the bullet point. This ensures clarity without over-glorifying.
For the results section, consider more instructions: the content should be containing content following this guideline. Rewrite this section.
Scope: Consider budget size, team size, impacted users/customers, and total projects managed.
Time: Highlight time saved, project duration, early completions, and efficiency compared to benchmarks.
Efficiency: Capture increased productivity percentages, resource savings, and tool/process implementation benefits.
Comparison: Showcase improvements over past work or outcomes.
Quantifiable Achievements: Back results with numbers, percentages, or qualitative outcomes.
Overall Impact: Optionally, emphasize the broader business impact.
Now it is time to tailor the CV to a specific job ad. For this you have your ‘pretty, designed CV’ and your ‘long CV’. Prompt for CHatGPT:
I am pasting the current job time line entries as a template for you in regards to length. I will be pasting the current job ad. Also I will provide you with a long CV where you can pick the content from. Please provide me with tailored job timeline entries for the job ad and keep the template of this.
See if you like it and adjust manually or tell ChatGPT what you don’t like.
Prompt for skills: I will now provide you with a job ad as well as my current skill section on my CV.
Please suggest a list of 5 skills that are relevant for the job.
Prompt for software: I will now provide you with a job ad as well as my current software section on my CV.
Please suggest a list of software that are relevant for the job. Include 5 specific tool examples for each software category.
Prompt to create a ‘highlight’ section for your CV for those with LOTS of experience. I find this useful to avoid employers getting lost in your 15 years of experience. Just a small section to show you have done relevant things. Here is a prompt for ChatGPT:
‘From the provided input about my work experience, please select 7 achievements relevant to the position of ‘xxx.’ Include at least 1 achievement from the three latest jobs. Do not select more than 2 achievements from the same company. For each selected achievement, provide the exact bullet point as written, followed by the job position and company name of the job you took the achievement from in brackets.’
I find that here it is not useful to paste the full job ad – just the title suffices. Then select the top 5 and put them in a highlight section on your CV.
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