Duties or achievements: how to describe experience on a CV
The Cvizo team3 min read
A duty describes the job, an achievement describes you. A recruiter knows what a nurse or an accountant does before opening your CV. What they look for is what you did in that role, at what scale, with what result, and evidence that it is true.
In short
- A duty repeats the posting you once answered. An achievement says what you did with the role.
- A strong bullet has a result, a scale and a method. The order can change, but all three must be there.
- Jobs without revenue still have numbers: volume, deadlines met, error rates, the people who relied on you.
- An invented percentage is worse than none. The first question about it costs the whole CV its credibility.
- Every bullet has to survive the request "tell me about that" without a long pause.
A duty describes the job, an achievement describes you. “Responsible for patient care on a surgical ward” is the line from the posting you were hired through, and the recruiter knew it before they opened your CV. What they are looking for is what you did with that role: how much, how well, and how.
Why a list of duties fails
The first pass over a CV is short. In the eye-tracking study Ladders ran in 2018, the average initial screen lasted 7.4 seconds, with attention going to layout, job titles and keywords. It is a vendor’s study with no published method, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude. The order of magnitude is enough: nobody reads eight duties in that time. They read the title and the first bullet beneath it.
If that bullet is a duty, it repeats the title. The reader already knows what you did and is looking for how you did it.
A formula for one bullet
Laszlo Bock, who ran people operations at Google, put it in one line: accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z. A result, a measure, a method. Rearrange the sentence however reads best, as long as none of the three goes missing.
Before: Handled customer complaints.
After: Cut the average time to close a complaint from nine working days to four by writing reply templates for the five most common cases.
The posting’s own phrase still matters, and it belongs inside the achievement, because parsers and recruiter searches match words, not meaning. These are also the bullets you move up when you tailor the CV to a posting.
Jobs where nobody counts revenue
A nurse, a teacher or an accountant rarely has conversion rates to quote, but their work still has numbers of a different kind.
Volume. Patients per shift, classes per week, client companies on your books. “Ran the month-end close for fourteen client companies, two of them filing in three countries” carries more than “bookkeeping”.
Deadlines and errors. Closes delivered on time, filings with no amendment, audits with no findings.
Who relied on you. Onboarding new nurses to the ward, mentoring trainees, being the person called in for the difficult case. Somebody had to decide to trust you with that, and the line should say so.
A change that stayed. A procedure you wrote that the ward still uses. A course the school kept running after you set it up.
The number you cannot defend
An invented percentage is worse than no percentage. The interview asks “how did you measure that?”, and “it felt like it” takes down not just that bullet but the reader’s faith in every other one.
If you do not know the exact figure, use the one you do know: a range, a headcount, a rough volume. “Around two hundred tickets a month” is honest. “Improved efficiency by 37%” with no source is not.
The “tell me about that” test
Read each bullet and picture a recruiter pointing at it and saying “tell me about that”. If you can say in one sentence where the number came from, which part was yours rather than the team’s, and what happened next, the bullet stays. If your answer starts with “so, basically”, rewrite it or cut it.
This sits alongside the empty-line test, which catches lines anybody could have written. This one catches lines that sound fine until somebody asks.
