How many lines should a role have

Three to five for a recent role, one or two for an older one. The evidence-depth rule in the check here reaches its full twenty-five points at five achievement lines across the whole section.

Past tense or present tense

Past tense for finished work, present for the job you are in now. Keep it consistent inside each role.

Should every line have a number

No. Two measurable lines reach the full twenty-five points of the measurable-evidence rule, and a third adds nothing to the score. Numbers you invent to reach a target are worse than no numbers at all.

What about responsibilities that produced nothing measurable

Say what you were responsible for and what it made possible. Scope is evidence: the size of the team, the regions covered, the systems owned.

Do bullet characters matter

Plain bullets are safe. Decorative symbols from an icon set cost eight points of parseability in the check here, because they extract as characters nobody can read.

Guide · Résumé

How to write the experience lines on a résumé

The experience section is the résumé. Everything above it is a label and everything below it is context. Here is how one line is built.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— one line, one thing that changed.

The experience section is the part of a résumé that does the work. A reader who is short of time reads your last two roles and skims the rest, so those lines decide most of what happens next. Each one has the same three parts: a verb, the work, and what changed.

The shape of one line

Start with a plain verb in the past tense. Name the thing you did. Finish with the outcome, and put a number on it if an honest number exists. "Cut checkout errors by forty-six per cent after tracing a race condition in the retry queue" is a whole story in nineteen words: what changed, by how much, and the piece of work that caused it.

Compare it with "responsible for improving checkout reliability". Same job, no evidence, and nothing a reader can ask about in an interview. A line that cannot be questioned cannot be credited either.

Lead with the verb, not with the team

Lines that begin "Worked with the platform team to help deliver" bury the action four words deep and hand the credit away. Choose the verb that describes your part precisely. If you led it, "led". If you built it, "built". If you supported somebody else's work, "supported" is honest and costs nothing. The action verbs guide lists the verbs the check here recognises, and why a fixed list exists at all.

Write down what changed

Most work changes something: a duration, a cost, an error rate, a volume, a headcount, a launch that happened. Write the change, then the cause. Readers remember the change and interviewers ask about the cause, which is the conversation you want. The measurement guide covers what to do when nothing was ever measured.

Detail follows recency

Five lines on the current role, three on the one before, one or two on anything older than about eight years. A role from 2011 with six bullet points tells a reader you have not edited the page since 2011. Older roles can be a single line each, and the oldest can be a list of titles and years under one heading.

How the check scores this section

The ATS résumé checker puts 40 per cent of the score on content, and content is four graded rules. Action-led achievements reach thirty points at three or more lines that begin with a recognised verb. Measurable evidence reaches twenty-five points at two or more lines carrying a figure. Evidence depth reaches twenty-five points at five achievement lines. Readable volume reaches twenty points at two hundred and fifty words. The report prints which rule earned what, so a thin section shows you exactly where it is thin.

Those rules are a floor, not a style guide. They measure whether the evidence is there in a form a parser can see. Whether the work was interesting is a judgement no checker makes.

Where the lines go in the builder

In the résumé builder each role is one entry: title, employer, place, start and end date, then the lines underneath. The rail counts the roles it holds, so a section you meant to finish and forgot is visible from the left-hand side. The page on the right is the document that will export, which means a line that runs to three rows on paper looks like three rows while you are still editing it.

The last pass

Read the section with the employer names covered. If the lines could belong to anyone with your job title, the specifics are missing. Put back the system, the region, the number, the awkward constraint you worked around. Then export to PDF or DOCX and check the file you will actually send, because the export is where a two-column layout does its damage.

Four faults that cost a line its value

The job description in disguise. A line copied from the posting you were hired against describes the role, not your part in it. Keep the duty only where you can attach an outcome to it.
Two achievements in one line. Each thing that changed gets its own line. A sentence carrying two results hides the weaker one and dilutes the stronger.
Jargon with no outside meaning. Internal project names, grade codes and team acronyms mean nothing to a reader in another organisation. Translate once, then use the short form.
A number with no base. A fall from four incidents to two is fifty per cent and a small event. Where the base is small, give the base and let the reader judge.

Roles that are hard to write

Some work resists this shape. Support and operations roles often repeat the same task thousands of times, and the achievement is the volume, the reliability or the thing you changed about how the task is done. Long projects that were cancelled still produced decisions, prototypes and findings, and a line about what the work established is honest even when nothing shipped. Where a role genuinely produced nothing you can point at, one line naming the scope is enough, and the space is better spent on the role that did.

Fold the experience section

Each role holds a title, an employer, dates and the lines underneath. The page beside the editor redraws as you write.

Open the résumé builder See what the check reads

Questions

How many lines should a role have: Three to five for a recent role, one or two for an older one. The evidence-depth rule in the check here reaches its full twenty-five points at five achievement lines across the whole section.
Past tense or present tense: Past tense for finished work, present for the job you are in now. Keep it consistent inside each role.
Should every line have a number: No. Two measurable lines reach the full twenty-five points of the measurable-evidence rule, and a third adds nothing to the score. Numbers you invent to reach a target are worse than no numbers at all.
What about responsibilities that produced nothing measurable: Say what you were responsible for and what it made possible. Scope is evidence: the size of the team, the regions covered, the systems owned.
Do bullet characters matter: Plain bullets are safe. Decorative symbols from an icon set cost eight points of parseability in the check here, because they extract as characters nobody can read.

Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.