Rewrote every resume bullet from what I was responsible for to what changed because of me

My old bullets were all "Responsible for maintaining the internal dashboard." Every one read like a job description someone else wrote.

I rewrote them around outcomes, even small ones:

Before: Responsible for maintaining the internal reporting dashboard.

After: Cut the reporting dashboard's load time from ~9s to under 2s by batching the API calls and caching the slowest query.

Getting that number meant digging through old screenshots and a Slack thread from last year, which was its own lesson. Half my bullets had nothing like it, because I'd never written any of it down while it was happening. I keep a note open now.

The other thing I noticed: interviewers started asking about the specific stuff in the bullets instead of "walk me through your experience". Much easier conversation to have.

Response rate went from something like 1 in 25 to 1 in 10, but that's off maybe 40 applications since, so it could easily be noise. The interviews getting better is the part I'm more sure about.