I read CVs every day. Hundreds a week. Thousands a year. And the saddest ones aren’t the shortest, or the messiest, or the ones with typos. The saddest ones are the ones where someone clearly stopped believing in themselves halfway through writing it.

You can spot them by the verbs. The CV opens strong — the first job, fresh from university, has bullets like “Built the customer onboarding pipeline that reduced churn by 18%.” Confident. Specific. Then somewhere in the middle, the verbs go soft. By the third job, every bullet starts with one of these:

I get why these phrases happen. People are trying to be honest. They didn’t single-handedly build the platform — they were one of seven engineers. They didn’t lead the migration — their staff engineer did. They feel uncomfortable claiming credit. So they hedge.

“Assisted with” is the verbal equivalent of standing in the back of a group photo and pointing at the person next to you.

Here’s what hiring managers actually read

When I see “assisted with the database migration” on a CV, here’s what registers in my head: this person was tangential to the migration. They watched it happen. Maybe they handled some of the easier tasks while the real work was done by someone else.

That might be true. It also might not be. But the verb chose for me. And in a stack of 200 CVs, I don’t have time to interview each candidate to find out what they actually did.

Now here’s the thing: if you wrote the SQL scripts, debugged the data integrity issues, ran the cutover, and stayed up until 3am to verify nothing was broken — you didn’t assist with the migration. You did the migration. The fact that you weren’t the architect doesn’t change that. The architects of most projects spend their time in meetings while other people do the actual work.

What to do instead

The fix is mechanical and takes about 20 minutes for a typical CV.

Step 1: Find every soft verb

Search your CV for: assisted, helped, supported, contributed, participated, was part of, was involved in. Highlight them all.

Step 2: For each, ask: what did I actually do?

Not what the team did. What action did your hands take? What did you produce, decide, or fix?

If the bullet was “Assisted with the customer onboarding redesign,” the real version might be:

Pick whichever is most accurate. Then write it. Specificity is what makes a CV believable. Vague verbs make hiring managers suspicious.

Step 3: Add numbers when you can

Numbers are evidence. They prove the action happened and had measurable impact. If you don’t have exact numbers, estimate. “Reduced support ticket volume by ~30%” is better than “helped reduce support tickets.”

What about when I really did just help?

Sometimes “assisted with” is the truthful description — you really were peripheral to the project. In that case, the question to ask is: does this bullet need to be on my CV at all?

Your CV is not a comprehensive list of every project you’ve been near. It’s a curated story of what you’ve done. Cut the bullets where you genuinely contributed little. Use the space to expand on the work where you were actually the engine.

One more thing

If you’re looking at your CV right now and feeling defensive — “but I really was just one of five people on that project” — pause for a moment. That feeling is exactly the thing that’s been hurting you.

The people who get hired aren’t necessarily the ones who did more than you. They’re the ones who can articulate what they did. That’s a skill, not a moral failing. And it’s one you can develop in an afternoon.

Be specific. Be proud. Use the verb that actually describes the work.

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