Two résumés can describe the same job and read completely differently. Same person, same work, same impact. One reads as a hands-on engineer who ships; the other reads as a director who delegates. The difference is verbs.
Execution verbs vs. strategic verbs
Execution verbs describe doing the work yourself: ship, build, write, deploy, instrument, query, triage, fix, patch, refactor, integrate, test, debug.
Strategic verbs describe directing or framing the work: led, aligned, defined, owned, championed, set the vision, partnered with, prioritized.
Both are real, both describe real work. The trap is using strategic verbs for hands-on work, which makes a senior IC’s résumé read as a director’s.
The verb-density gap
Job descriptions for IC roles use execution verbs at high density. Run a verb-count on a typical mid-level engineering or PM JD and you’ll see ship/write/triage/deploy mentioned 12–18 times in a 600-word posting.
Run the same count on a senior IC résumé that’s been recently promoted to “Lead” or “Head of” — execution verbs show up 4–6 times, while strategic verbs hit 10+. The density inverts.
That inversion is the rejection signal. A reviewer skimming for hands-on signal won’t find it.
How to check yourself
Open your résumé. Look at the first verb of each bullet in your most recent role. Tally:
- “Led / Owned / Aligned / Defined / Championed / Set / Partnered” → strategic
- “Shipped / Wrote / Built / Deployed / Triaged / Queried / Instrumented / Refactored” → execution
If 60%+ of your top-bullet verbs are strategic and you’re applying to an IC role, you’re failing the verb-density test before the recruiter reads a metric.
The diagnostic does this automatically and flags it as one of the four indicator scores (Execution: Weak / Partial / Strong).
The fix — 3 bullet rewrites, 10 minutes
You don’t need to rewrite the résumé. Pick the 3 bullets where the work was actually hands-on but you described it strategically, and rewrite them.
Pattern:
- Before: “Owned the Growth roadmap end-to-end, partnering with senior stakeholders to prioritize strategic bets.”
- After: “Shipped 22 A/B tests on the sign-up funnel in 2024, writing SQL against a 40-table warehouse. 6 hit significance; lifted D7 retention +4.1 pp.”
Same work. Different read. The first sounds like a director; the second sounds like an IC who knows their stuff.
When not to switch verbs
If you genuinely managed people and the role is a leadership role, keep the strategic verbs. The advice here is specifically for when:
- The role is execution-flavored (IC, hands-on, individual contributor).
- You did the work yourself (or alongside one IC).
- Your bullet describes it strategically out of habit or seniority signaling.
Lying about hands-on experience is worse than the wrong verb. The fix is reframing what you actually did, accurately.
Related reading
- Mirror the job description verbs in your resume — the technique for verb-matching without copy-paste.
- How to rewrite resume bullets for a job description — the bullet-level playbook.
- Seniority mismatch on a resume — verb density is one axis of the mismatch signal.