Half of every resume bullet starts with one of 50 words
We counted the opening word of 21,305 bullet points across 1,385 real resumes. There were 2,083 different words to choose from. Fifty of them cover more than half of every bullet written.
The ten words that open a quarter of all bullets
Every one of these is a strong action verb, which is exactly what resume advice asks for. That is the problem. A word that opens a bullet in nearly half of all resumes is not distinguishing anybody.
| Opening word | Bullets | Share of bullets | Resumes using it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built | 1,304 | 6.1% | 47.9% |
| Developed | 835 | 3.9% | 39.1% |
| Designed | 777 | 3.6% | 38.1% |
| Led | 473 | 2.2% | 23.3% |
| Implemented | 373 | 1.8% | 18.4% |
| Executed | 360 | 1.7% | 19.8% |
| Conducted | 350 | 1.6% | 18.9% |
| Collaborated | 342 | 1.6% | 21.7% |
| Managed | 341 | 1.6% | 19.2% |
| Analyzed | 270 | 1.3% | 18.1% |
How quickly the vocabulary collapses:
- Top 5 words: 17.7% of all bullets
- Top 10 words: 25.5%
- Top 20 words: 35.6%
- Top 50 words: 51.8%
- Top 100 words: 62.7%
The remaining 1,983 words split the other 37.3% between them. If you want a bullet to sound like yours rather than like everyone's, the opening word is the cheapest place to start. Our action verbs guide covers what to reach for instead.
The other way out of the crowd is to stop guessing which words matter. Paste the posting into our job description keyword extractor and it will show the skills that job is asking for, each one marked with how many resumes already list it. The rare ones are where a bullet earns its place.
The standard advice has already been followed
Most resume advice is some version of "use strong verbs and add numbers". Judging by these resumes, people did it.
- 93.1% include at least one number in their achievements, and the average resume has 7.0 of them.
- The average resume uses 10.3 strong action verbs against 0.8 weak ones.
- The average resume carries 15.4 bullet points across a median of 3 listed jobs.
The one classic gap that is still open: 25.4% have no summary section at all, which is the first thing a reader's eye lands on. If that is you, start with resume summary examples.
So the common advice is not wrong, it is finished. Everyone took it, and a rule everyone follows stops sorting anybody. What it left behind is the part nobody writes about.
What people did not fix: the page itself
While the words got polished, the layout did not. These are properties of the document, counted by our parser as it read each file.
| Layout property | Resumes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-column layout | 736 | 53.1% |
| More than three font faces | 765 | 55.2% |
| Table-like structure | 764 | 55.2% |
| Body text under 10pt | 348 | 25.1% |
More than half of these resumes are laid out in columns. Column order is the single most common thing automated parsers read wrong, and it is also what makes a human reader jump around the page instead of down it. Our ATS format guide covers the safe version.
Word choice is a rewrite. Layout is an export setting. The cheaper fix is the one almost nobody makes.
How we counted
The sample. 3,029 resumes were uploaded to ResumeHeatMap and analysed up to 9 August 2026. Every figure on this page comes from the 1,385 of them where bullet points were extracted cleanly, holding 21,305 bullets in total. The rest were excluded because their PDFs did not yield reliable line structure, not because of anything about their content.
What an opening word is. A bullet is a line that begins with a bullet glyph. Its opening word is the first word on that line, lower-cased. Lines starting with a digit or a symbol, such as a date range, are not counted.
Who these people are. This is not a sample of the job market. It is a sample of people who went looking for a resume checker, which means they already suspected something was wrong. Expect them to be more polished than average on the things advice columns talk about, and no better than average on the things they do not.
What the layout numbers are. They are our parser's reading of each document, not the verdict of any particular applicant tracking system. Different systems read the same file differently. No resume here was submitted to a real employer's system as part of this count.