How Many Bullet Points Should I List per Job on a Resume?

Bullet points can enhance your resume by highlighting your top skills and achievements. But if you use the wrong amount of them, you’ll make it harder for recruiters and hiring managers to see how you’re qualified or why they should call you for an interview. This guide will help you determine the right number of bullet points for each job so your resume positions you effectively.

Filter Information Based on Your Goals

First and foremost, view your past jobs in light of your current career goals. This perspective tells you how important the experience is to your job search, and therefore how much detail it should have on your resume. Follow these four steps:

1. Clarify your job search goals if you haven’t already. Consider and write down your target job duties and any preferences for title, industry, employer size, or work culture.

2. For each job in your recent work history, brainstorm your various duties and achievements on a separate document or sheet of paper. Don’t worry at this stage whether every detail matters to your resume – just write everything down as you think of it.

Tip: Write exclusively in “I” statements at this stage for an easier time gathering your thoughts. This sentence structure also makes it easier to convert your notes to bullet-point formatting in step 4.

3. Review each note you’ve brainstormed and consider: Does this speak to your target job? In other words, does it overlap with the duties or results you expect to focus on in your next position? If not, delete it or cross it out.

4. Copy and format the remaining information as bullet points under the respective job in your resume experience section.

By filtering your information this way, you’ll have fewer bullet points under your less relevant jobs. This approach lets you add more bullet points under your pertinent jobs, helping employers see the depth of your related experience.

Resume Bullet Point Guidelines

Limit yourself to two bullet points under any job with little or no relevance, even if you held the position recently and/or for a long time. (In these cases, consider a functional format to highlight your transferable skills and downplay slender job descriptions on your resume.)

As for relevant jobs, there’s no strict rule on the number of bullet points – you might have many, especially if you held the job for years and worked on various important projects.

But follow the above process closely to be confident in the number you arrive at. Think creatively in step 2 to generate plenty of details, and critically in step 3 to weigh each detail’s relevance to your job search. Also, keep these tips in mind:

Add subheadings

Use subheadings to break up your information for any job description with more than five bullet points. Subheadings help you avoid long lists of bullet points, no matter how thorough the job description is. They also let you emphasize skills related to your target job and make the resume more keyword-optimized for applicant tracking systems (ATS). Below are two examples of this structure:

Keep the right resume length

Your resume should be at least about a page long. If your document is much shorter, repeat the four-step process above to generate more bullet points, or more detail for the ones you already have.

At the same time, your resume shouldn’t be more than two pages (unless you’re writing a curriculum vitae). If your document is longer, try condensing the format by reducing font size or narrowing your page margins or line spacing. Otherwise, you may need to remove some bullet points in your experience section. Start with the least relevant ones. For instance, do any of your bullet points relate to a skill not required by the job opening?

Another good way to save space (especially for senior-level job seekers) is by dividing your job descriptions into duties and achievements, then condensing your duties into a brief paragraph above the bullet points:

With this structure, the paragraph points are assumed to be duties, while the bullet points are the results and highlights of your tenure.

You may also condense your work history by merging or deleting bullet points from your earliest positions. Recruiters and hiring managers generally care more about what you’ve done recently. If you need to pare back information, do so from your early jobs so your resume keeps focused on your recent work.

Andrew Stoner

Executive Resume Writer and Career Coach

Andrew Stoner is an executive career coach and resume writer with 17 years of experience as a hiring manager and operations leader at two Fortune 500 Financial Services companies, and as the career services director at two major university business schools.