Action verbs that actually land — a curated list with examples

Short answer: the verbs that survive a CV scan are short, concrete, and imply either a physical action, a measurable change, or ownership. Use wrote, built, shipped, cut, doubled, led, owned, founded. Retire leveraged, spearheaded, orchestrated, championed. The reasoning is below, with examples you can lift.

If you’ve read more than two articles about writing a CV, you’ve seen the lists. Leveraged. Spearheaded. Orchestrated. Words that sound active until you actually try to put them on a page.

The problem isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that they’ve been used so often, in so much advice content, that recruiters’ eyes glide right past them. They’ve become noise — and there is not much time to spare. Ladders’ eye-tracking study found recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds on a CV before deciding whether to keep reading. A verb that doesn’t pull weight in that window is a verb the recruiter never registered.

The verbs that still work

Strong CV verbs cluster into three families. Each one signals a different kind of evidence, and a usable CV mixes all three rather than leaning on one.

• Specific physical actions. 'Wrote,' 'shipped,' 'built,' 'drew up,' 'ran.'
• Verbs of measurable change. 'Cut,' 'doubled,' 'halved,' 'lifted.'
• Verbs of ownership. 'Owned,' 'led,' 'founded,' 'hired.'

What’s notably absent from this list is the LinkedIn buzzword tier. Orchestrated, leveraged, spearheaded, championed. Words that try to do the work of a sentence by themselves and end up doing none of it. If you cover the verb and the rest of the bullet stops making sense, the verb wasn’t carrying meaning — it was carrying tone.

A working list

Here’s the curated set, with the kind of bullet each one fits in.

Verbs of building

• Built — “Built and maintained the design system used by 18 engineers.”
• Shipped — “Shipped the patient onboarding flow for an NHS-commissioned service.”
• Wrote — “Wrote the editorial style guide adopted across the marketing team.”

These verbs work because they’re concrete. A hiring manager can picture you doing them.

Verbs of measurable change

• Cut — “Cut design review cycle time by half.”
• Lifted — “Lifted weekly active use by 34% within two quarters.”
• Doubled — “Doubled the conversion rate of the trial-to-paid funnel.”

Each of these implies a number, which is the point. If you don’t have the number, don’t use the verb. “Lifted engagement” without a percentage is the same noise as “leveraged synergies.”

Verbs of ownership

• Led — “Led the team of three through the platform rebuild.”
• Owned — “Owned the studio’s component library through two releases.”
• Founded — “Founded the design ops practice from scratch.”

These verbs claim something. Use them when you can defend the claim in an interview — and don’t reach for them just because they sound senior. A misused led is worse than an honest contributed to, because the wrong verb signals a writer describing the job title rather than the work.

The retirement list

Words to consider replacing with one of the above, on the grounds that they’ve stopped doing any work:

• Leveraged
• Spearheaded
• Orchestrated
• Championed
• Drove (with no object)
• Facilitated
• Coordinated
• Liaised

If you’re using one of these and the sentence still works without it, cut the sentence and keep the rest.

What to do when the bullet won’t survive

If you find yourself rewriting the same bullet three times to make a tired verb survive, the bullet itself may be the thing to cut — not the verb. Once you’ve fixed the openers, the next move is to make sure your CV survives the six-second first pass.