Use present tense for what you still do in your current role, past tense for everything else — previous jobs entirely, and finished achievements even inside your current job. Lead the product launch, but shipped the redesign in March. Mixed tense within one role is correct when it follows that line; random tense drift is what reads as careless.
Rule one: past roles take past tense, every bullet, no exceptions — managed, built, delivered. You no longer do those things, and present tense on a job that ended in 2022 reads as either an error or a stale copy-paste. Rule two: within your current role, tense follows whether the thing is ongoing or done. Own the pricing roadmap is present because you still own it; renegotiated the vendor contract, saving 18 percent is past because the deed is complete.
That means a current role legitimately mixes tenses, and the mix is information: present-tense bullets describe your scope, past-tense bullets describe your wins. Many strong resumes deliberately shape current-role bullets this way — a scope line or two in present tense up top, then completed, quantified achievements in past tense beneath.
Achievement bullets are stronger in past tense even inside a current job, because completion is the point. Increase revenue is a duty; increased revenue 40 percent is an outcome that already happened and cannot be argued with. Recruiters and hiring managers read past-tense quantified bullets as evidence and present-tense equivalents as job description — same facts, different weight.
This is also why copying your official job description into your resume produces weak bullets: job descriptions are written in the eternal present of responsibilities. Rewriting them as past-tense results — what actually happened because you did the job — is the single highest-leverage edit most resumes need, and tense is the visible marker of whether it happened.
Whatever you do, do it everywhere. The credibility damage comes not from choosing present tense for scope lines but from drift — two past-tense bullets, one present, one fragment with no verb — which signals the resume was assembled from scraps over years without a read-through. Before sending, scan only the first word of every bullet; the pattern check takes thirty seconds.
Edge cases: summaries conventionally use present tense without pronouns — product leader who builds zero-to-one teams. Ongoing freelance and volunteer work follows the current-role rule. A role you are leaving this month is still present tense until it is not. And avoid future tense entirely; the resume records what you do and did, and promises about what you will do belong in the cover letter and the interview.
Yes — that is the correct pattern, not an inconsistency. Present tense for ongoing scope, past tense for completed achievements within the role. What reads as sloppy is random drift that does not follow that logic.
Past tense, immediately. The moment any role ends, all its bullets flip to past. A resume still describing a finished internship in present tense looks unrevised — one of the most common errors on early-career resumes.
Yes. The summary describes who you are now, in third person with no pronouns: engineer who scales data platforms. Achievements cited inside it can still be past tense — led the migration that cut costs 30 percent.
The free scorer reads every bullet — including weak, verbless, and drifting ones — and shows which lines need the rewrite.
