The CV Bullet You Should Always Cut, Even When It's True

Short answer: if a bullet doesn’t open with a strong verb, name a specific number, system, or change, and survive a follow-up question in interview, cut it — even when the work behind it was real. The marginal bullet dilutes the strong ones around it.

There is a particular bullet on most CVs that the candidate is quietly proud of, but a recruiter wishes weren’t there. It is the I also helped with bullet. It usually sits fourth or fifth in a role, after the strong material has been used up, and it describes a project the candidate touched but didn’t own. The candidate keeps it because it’s true, because they did the work, and because cutting it feels like erasing something. The recruiter wishes it were gone because it dilutes the three bullets above it.

A CV is not graded on its bullet count. It is graded on its best bullet. Every additional bullet you add is competing with your best one for attention — the recruiter’s eye spends a fixed amount of time on the role, and the more lines you give them, the less time each one gets. Ladders’ eye-tracking research put the initial scan at 7.4 seconds, up from six in their original 2012 study. Whatever the exact number, the order of magnitude is the point: a fifth or sixth bullet is competing for a slice of attention measured in fractions of a second. The marginal bullet — the also helped with, the cross-functional initiative you contributed to — does not add evidence. It dilutes the evidence already there.

Why subtraction beats addition

The intuition most candidates carry into CV-writing is that more evidence is better. It makes sense at first glance — surely a recruiter who reads more about you is a recruiter who knows more about you. The reality is the opposite. Recruiters do not read CVs cumulatively. They scan, they latch onto the strongest piece of evidence they can find, and they decide. The strongest evidence is what gets remembered. Everything else is noise around it.

Adding a weaker bullet to a strong list doesn’t add up — it averages down. The recruiter who lands on your fifth-strongest bullet, then your strongest, walks away with a memory of the candidate has a mix of substantial and minor work. The recruiter who lands on your strongest, then leaves, walks away with a memory of the candidate did this thing. The second memory is the one that gets you to interview.

The principle is the same one that drives the front-loading move on page one — a CV is hiring the best version of you that exists on the page, and every weaker line is an invitation to grade you on your average instead.

Three cuts

The principle is easier to feel than to read about. Here are three before/afters across different career stages — each one removes the marginal bullet, and each one ends up stronger for it.

Mid-career operations manager.

The fourth bullet describes a real contribution to a real programme. It is also vague, soft-verbed, and immediately weaker than the three above it. The recruiter who reads it forms a less impressive picture of the candidate than the recruiter who stops at bullet three. The fourth bullet is true, and it makes the CV worse.

Early-career marketing executive.

The third bullet is the most honest of the three about what an early-career marketing executive actually does day-to-day — meetings, reporting, supporting the team. It is also a bullet that any early-career marketing executive could have written about themselves. It adds nothing the recruiter could not have assumed. The two bullets above it are specific to this candidate, in this role. Keep those. Cut the rest.

Senior leader, head of product.

This one is the most tempting bullet to keep, because it sounds senior. Key voice in the executive team signals seniority, and at a glance it reads as a credibility-builder. In practice, it is the only bullet on the list without a specific output, and a recruiter scanning four bullets will subconsciously read it as the weakest evidence available. Cutting it makes the three above it look stronger, because the candidate is no longer offering an alternative, vaguer version of themselves alongside them.

What you’re really protecting

The reason candidates hold onto marginal bullets is rarely about the evidence — it is about the work itself. The bullet feels like a record of the effort the candidate put in. Cutting it feels like denying that the work happened. This is the wrong frame. The CV is not a record. It is a sales document. The work happened whether or not it appears on the page, and your career is the sum of the things you did, not the sum of the things you listed.

A useful reframe — your CV is a film trailer, not a filmography. The trailer for a film does not show every scene. It shows the three scenes that make you want to see the film. A trailer that included every minor moment would be a worse trailer, even though all the scenes in it were real. The same is true of a CV. The bullets you cut do not stop being part of your career. They just stop being part of the trailer.

The candidates who learn to cut are the candidates who end up with the strongest CVs, not because they have fewer accomplishments than everyone else but because the ones on the page are the ones they have chosen to be graded on. The marginal bullet has a negative expected value — it makes the average lower, the peak less prominent, and the page denser. Subtraction is the move. Trust your best material to carry the document by itself, because that’s what the recruiter is going to do anyway. The same logic applies to the skills section most CVs still carry out of habit — claim less, prove more.