Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Words to Get Hired By
Chapter 6: Keeping Your Resume Parallel

Page 163

Here, the bullet points are correctly parallel, all using simple present tense verbs:

  • Solve problems and correct processes to ensure quality service, satisfy customer needs, and assure that company's interests and resources were efficiently utilized.
  • Frequently deliver solutions to urgent, complicated issues thought to be impossible to resolve and earn the gratitude of dealers, sales field reps, and business partners.
  • Provide excellent customer service, offering quality products and exceptional assistance for dealers; respond quickly to customer needs and requests.
  • Fine-tune processes and initiate clearer information sharing through new forms and communication tools.
  • Improve communication and processes with shipping carriers; suggest warehouse process improvement to eliminate shipping errors; assist in analyzing product need and frequency to forecast warehouse stock and ensure its adequacy for demand while reducing inventory without compromising availability.
  • Aid in developing and implementing dealer Web site that decreased incoming call volume because dealers can now place their orders online.
In general, use simple present-tense verbs for a current job you still hold and past-tense verbs for past jobs. It gets a bit tricky when you are describing a current job, but you need to highlight a past accomplishment in that job. For example, the current job of the job-seeker above included a one-time accomplishment, as opposed to an ongoing aspect of her job:

  • Reduced shipping costs caused by errors in updating dealer database.

Here, there is little choice but to use past tense for this past accomplishment. The parallelism is hampered, but these past accomplishments can be grouped together at the beginning or end of the bulleted list of job functions and accomplishments so the transition from present to past is less jarring to the reader.

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