Experience entries: stop listing duties, start showing impact.

Open your LinkedIn experience section and read the first bullet under your current role. If it starts with "Responsible for," "Managed," or "Oversaw" — you've written a job description, not a track record. And a job description is what your employer wrote before you got there. It says nothing about you.

Duties describe the chair. Impact describes the person in it.

Two people can hold the same title with identical duty lists and deliver wildly different results. The duty list can't tell them apart — which means when a decision-maker reads yours, they learn only that you occupied a role. Every professional who ever held that title can say the same. You've spent your best years being distinguishable in reality and identical on paper.

The formula: Action → Mechanism → Outcome

What you did + how you did it + what measurably changed. The middle piece is what most people skip, and it's the credibility bridge — without a mechanism, an outcome sounds like something that happened near you rather than because of you.

• Action: a strong verb that implies ownership. Built, rebuilt, launched, turned around, consolidated, negotiated.
• Mechanism: the specific lever you pulled. "By restructuring the handoff between marketing and sales." This is where your expertise actually shows.
• Outcome: a number, or the closest honest thing to one. Percent, dollar, time, headcount, retention, ranking.

"But I don't have numbers"

You almost certainly do — they're just not written down. Go looking in four places:

1. Before and after. What was true when you started, what was true when you left? Team size, process time, error rate, revenue, headcount retained. The delta is your number.
2. Scale. How many people, dollars, locations, accounts, tickets, events? Scale is a number even when improvement isn't measured.
3. Firsts. Did you build something that didn't exist? "Created the company's first onboarding program" is a hard fact with no percentage required.
4. Other people's words. Performance reviews, thank-you emails, and client feedback are full of numbers you forgot. Go read them.

And when a number genuinely doesn't exist, be concretely qualitative rather than vaguely quantitative. "Rebuilt the schedule so the team stopped losing every Friday to manual reconciliation" is specific, human, and verifiable. It beats an invented percentage every time — and inventing numbers is a fireable, career-ending shortcut. Don't.

Formatting that gets read

• Three to five bullets per role, max. Nobody reads eight. Your fourth-best bullet is diluting your first.
• Lead with your strongest. Mobile truncates. Your best line must be above the fold.
• Weight recent roles heavier. Five bullets for the current job, two for the one from 2013.
• One-line role summary, then bullets. Give context ("Ran ops for a 4-location group doing $8M") so the bullets have a stage to stand on.

Rewrite one role tonight — just one, your current one, five bullets. Then read it back and ask: could someone else with this title have written this? If yes, keep cutting until the answer is no. What's left is your actual value, finally written down.