Step 3 of 6·8 min read
Polish Experience & Skills
Turn your job descriptions into achievements, and your skills into signal.
Why this matters
Job descriptions aren't experience
Most people fill in their Experience section with a copy-paste of their job description: 'Led a team of X. Responsible for Y. Owned Z.' That tells the reader what your job was supposed to be, not what you actually did.
Recruiters, customers, and future collaborators want the second thing. This step is about rewriting one job at a time so each bullet earns its line.
Key principle
Achievement-based bullets > responsibility-based bullets
Don't write "Managed the customer support team." Write "Cut average ticket response time from 14 hours to 2 hours by rebuilding our triage flow." The first describes a chair you sat in. The second describes work you did.
The 3-part bullet formula
Action verb + specific work + measurable outcome
[What you did] + [How you did it] + [What changed because of it]
Example
Rebuilt onboarding flow as a 4-step wizard, dropping new-user drop-off from 47% to 18% in 90 days.
Use a strong verb to lead
Not "responsible for" or "involved in". Those are passive. Use: built, shipped, led, cut, doubled, redesigned, hired, scaled, automated, eliminated, launched.
Always include a number when possible
Conversion rate, headcount, dollar amount, time saved, percentage, count of customers. If you can't put a number on it, ask yourself what changed because of your work. That's the number.
Achievement-based bullet examples
Same role, different framing. Notice how each strong version answers 'so what?'
Engineering
❌ Worked on the payments team
Tells me a chair you sat in.
✅ Migrated payments to Stripe Connect, reducing per-transaction failure rate from 2.4% to 0.6%
Tells me what changed.
❌ Responsible for code reviews
✅ Reviewed 1,200+ PRs, established our async review SLA of 4 hours, kept the team unblocked
Marketing
❌ Managed the company blog
✅ Grew the blog from 12k to 84k monthly readers in 18 months by shifting to long-form SEO
❌ Ran paid acquisition campaigns
✅ Cut paid CAC from $340 to $190 across LinkedIn and Google by killing 60% of underperforming creative
Sales
❌ Met quota every quarter
✅ Hit 138% of quota for 5 consecutive quarters; closed our 2nd-largest deal ever ($840k ACV)
❌ Built sales playbook
✅ Wrote our outbound playbook adopted by all 12 AEs; team's reply rate doubled in 60 days
Design
❌ Worked on the mobile app
✅ Redesigned the iOS onboarding, lifting day-7 retention from 22% to 34% (A/B tested over 6 weeks)
Key principle
Skills: pick the 5 that LinkedIn shows by default
You can list up to 50 skills, but only your top 5 appear on your profile without clicking "show more". Those 5 are what 90% of viewers see. Choose them deliberately: the skills you want to be hired for, in the order you want to be remembered.
Endorsement strategy
Endorsements are social signal. The math: 99 endorsements on "Python" looks like a real engineer. 4 endorsements on "Synergy" looks like LinkedIn spam. Cull the weak skills aggressively, then ask 5-10 colleagues to endorse the 3-5 you actually want to rank for. Quid pro quo (you endorse them back) is the norm, not awkward.
Polish your Experience & Skills
0 / 7Run through this for each role on your profile.