Should your resume use past or present tense?

Use present tense for work you still do and past tense for work you have finished or stopped doing. A current job can contain both: ongoing responsibilities in present tense and completed projects in past tense. Choose the tense for each activity, rather than changing every bullet to match the job's “Present” date.

For a former role, describe your actions in past tense. If you are updating an older resume, check both the employment dates and the verbs before sending it again.

Decide what is ongoing and what is finished

Ask what each bullet describes as of the application date:

• A task you still perform: Use present tense, such as “Review weekly order reports.”
• A project or deliverable you completed: Use past tense, such as “Created an order-checking checklist,” even if you still work there.
• A responsibility you no longer hold: Use past tense, even if you remain with the employer in the same job.
• Work still in progress: Describe what you are doing now. Do not use “launched” or “completed” for an outcome that has not happened.

“Present” beside a job title describes your employment status. It does not mean that every task you have ever done there is ongoing. A finished project can also stay in use after your part in it ends. Its continued use does not make creating it ongoing work.

If a current-role entry contains only completed accomplishments, all its bullets can be in past tense. You do not need to add a routine duty just to use both tenses.

Show both tenses in a current job

Leah Martin and Cedar Shore Office Supply are fictional. Leah is an administrative assistant in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and still holds the role in this example. She checks weekly order reports and sends unresolved discrepancies to the office manager. In June 2026, she completed a checklist for reviewing those reports. She still uses the checklist but has finished writing it and no longer revises it.

“Review” and “send” describe Leah's recurring work. “Created” describes a finished deliverable. Changing it to “Create” would present the checklist as work still underway, which is not true here.

She could describe the continuing use as “Use the order-checking checklist to review weekly reports.” That would emphasize her current method. The past-tense bullet instead shows what she produced. Choose the detail that supports the application, without repeating the same task across several bullets.

The resume bullet-point guide helps you add context and evidence once the timing is clear. Leah's checklist is a concrete deliverable. She does not need to invent an error-reduction percentage to make it worth mentioning.

Use the right verb form at the start

Resume bullets usually leave out “I.” Write the action as you would after that implied subject: “I review” becomes “Review,” and “I created” becomes “Created.” For your own current work, use “Review,” rather than the third-person form “Reviews.”

Check irregular past forms as well. “Lead” becomes “led,” “build” becomes “built,” and “write” becomes “wrote.” Choose the verb for the work you actually did. Changing “helped” to “led” changes your claimed responsibility, not just the grammar.

When a bullet contains several actions, check each one. “Reviewed reports and sends discrepancies” mixes the timing without explaining why. For Leah's ongoing work, “Review reports and send discrepancies” keeps both actions current.

Different tenses can make sense within one sentence when the timing is clear. A completed action can have a continuing result, as in “Created an order-checking checklist now used for every weekly report review.” If the sentence becomes hard to follow, split the completed work and the ongoing activity into separate bullets, as Leah does above.

Update the entry after leaving the role

Say Leah leaves Cedar Shore in March 2027. For a later application, she would replace “Present” with that end month and change the ongoing-work bullet to past tense:

“Created” stays unchanged because that action was already complete. There is no need to write “had created” simply because the job ended. Keep the checklist's real completion date when you update the employment dates.

Apply the same timing check to volunteer work and personal projects. An unfinished project needs wording for the work done so far, rather than a claim that the whole project is complete.

Check the final version in context

In Better Resume, edit the relevant Experience entry's Description (Optional) field. Check Currently work here against your actual employment status. For a role that has ended, clear that checkbox and enter the End date. Review the wording separately so the dates and activities tell the same story.

Use Preview, then Download PDF to get the file you plan to send. Open that file and read each bullet alongside its role dates. The common resume mistakes checklist covers the wider check for mismatched details and formatting problems.