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Practical guide
Lead, design, sell, analyse, organise, train: verbs grouped by family, in English and French, before-and-after lines, and the phrases to ban from your CV for good.
A CV line that starts with a verb says straight away what you did. A line that starts with “Responsible for” only says what was expected of you. This guide gives verbs grouped by type of task, in English and French, before-and-after lines, and the phrases that weaken a CV. It does not repeat the method for turning a duty into a measurable achievement: that is in our guide to raising your CV's value, linked below.
In English, use the past tense for jobs you have left (“Designed”, “Negotiated”) and the present tense for your current one (“Design”), and never “I”. In French, the past participle is the usual form for a job you have left (“Conçu”, “Négocié”), and the present tense or a noun form for your current one. What counts is consistency: a single form per job. Checking your tenses is part of our guide to proofreading your CV.
Pick the family that matches what you did, not your job title: an accountant who set up a new tool “rolled out”, a salesperson who took on interns “trained”. The English verbs are in the past tense, the form for a job you have left. The French ones, for a CV in French, are given in the infinitive: on the CV, write them as past participles (“piloté”) or nouns (“pilotage”), whichever form you have chosen.
Replace each “[X]” with your real figures, or remove it if you have none: an accurate line beats a made-up figure.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Responsible for managing the team's schedule | Organised the weekly schedule for a team of [X] and put an end to last-minute changes |
| In charge of supplier relations | Selected suppliers, negotiated their annual contracts and monitored delivery quality |
| Took part in launching a new product | Wrote the product sheets and trained the sales staff for the new product launch |
| Worked on the implementation of a new ticketing tool | Rolled out the new ticketing tool to the support team and trained its [X] users |
In the third example, the person had “taken part”: the right rewrite does not promote them to project lead, it names what they did themselves.
A good verb opens the line; the result closes it. The full formula (verb, action, result, context) and how to dig up your figures are in our guide to raising your CV's value. Your skills, for their part, are proven in their own section: see skills on a CV. And for consistent tenses from one line to the next, our guide to proofreading your CV.
To save time, the analysis quotes the weak lines in your CV and proposes word-for-word rewrites, with the reason: that is Word-for-word fixes. And the AI-improved CV rewrites your whole CV with action verbs, without making anything up: every figure missing from your CV becomes “[X]”, and the AI asks you a few questions before writing if something is missing.
In English, the past tense (“Led”, “Designed”) is the norm for jobs you have left and the present tense for your current one; noun forms (“Management of…”) are acceptable if used throughout, but tend to read like a list of duties. In a French CV, the past participle (“Piloté”, “Conçu”) is the usual form for a job you have left. What matters most is not mixing forms within the same job.
Not at all costs, but avoid the same verb twice within one job. If you write “Managed” three times, you are probably describing duties: ask yourself what you actually did, led, negotiated, reduced, and the right verb comes on its own.
Not directly: screening software mainly looks for the job titles, skills and tools in the ad. But a line that opens with a precise verb puts those keywords right after it, in plain view, and it is that line that convinces the recruiter once you are past the filter.
The site's tools and features that go with this guide: the figures there are calculated by the code, never by the AI.