Sudden Death From Too Many Resume Bullets

Bulleted lists are often used on resumes to highlight specific talking points and areas of achievement. But too frequently bullets are misused and they end up diminishing the impact of the talking points rather than enhancing them. Here are a few common mistakes candidates make when using bullet points on their resume.

Too Many Bullets
When job seekers create a list of more than five bullets in a row, nothing stands out and the text starts to look like one big paragraph. A better strategy is to create functional headings such as Business Development, Marketing, Financial Analysis, etc. This allows you to group your bullet points in sub-sections and quickly differentiate the types of value-add statements you are including in the resume.

Mixed Purpose Bullets
Frequently job seekers mix information about job tasks with information regarding accomplishments. This waters down the value of the accomplishment statement and makes it harder to spot amongst a sea of task-oriented statements. A better strategy is to report job tasks in a brief paragraph format and identify accomplishments in a bulleted list to differentiate the two and make it easier for the reader to quickly spot the accomplishments.

Unique Bullets
Sometimes candidates use unusual symbols for their bullets that can be quite distracting for the reader. It's better to stick with traditional circles and squares when creating bullet points. You want your resume to be memorable based on its accomplishments, rather than unusual formatting.