First, I want you to take a look at your resume. What do you see?
Do you have…. “great attention to detail”, a “strong work ethic” and “great customer service skills”? Great – you have the same key skills as most other applicants to the job you want.
Next, take a look at your responsibilities. Could these also be the same as most other applicants applying for the same role?
So, how do we make your resume stand out from the rest to help you stand a better chance of getting the job YOU want?
We do this by adding quantifiable data!
Quantifying your resume gives the hiring manager a strong indication of your skill level and will clearly show the impact you have had in your previous employment. This will, in turn, give your potential new employer a strong incentive to hire you. For example:
Person 1: Duties included taking field measurements and maintaining records, setting up and tracking project using Microsoft Project, and developing computerized material take-off sheets.
Person 2: Initiated and managed tracking systems used for the Green District water decontamination project, saving $125,000 on the overall project through a 30% decrease of staff allocation time.
Which one sounds more impressive to you?
Even if you aren’t privy to this kind of financial data, or perhaps you have left the role and no longer have access to the figures. You can add numbers to your resume in terms of the size of the team you led, the budgets you worked with, what your KPI’s were and how often you hit them and more.
Here are three ways you can quantify your experience:
1. Range
Not knowing the exact figure for things is often a big deterrent for using numbers in resumes. But one way to overcome this is to use a range.
It’s perfectly fine to not know exactly how many clients you see a month or how many calls you take a week, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still quantify it.
Give it your best estimate, and the range will show that there is a bit of leeway. And, of course, focus on the impact you made within the business. If you saved your employer money, increased their profits or benefited them in any way – use this as a selling point. For example:
Person 1: Responsible for supervising undergraduate researchers.
Person 2: Supervised 7-12 undergraduate research students each year; who have all since gone on to graduate school in astrophysics, physics, or mathematics.
2. Frequency
Now that you know it’s fine to use a range, one of the easiest ways to add some numbers is to include how frequently you do a particular task (after all, that’s a number that applies to pretty much everyone).
This is particularly helpful in illustrating your work in high-volume situations—a hiring manager will be able to see just how much you can handle. For example:
Before: Completed first editing pass on articles.
After: Reviewed and evaluated 40-50 topical articles per week and made the decision to either pass articles to the editorial team or send articles back to authors for further revisions.
3. Scale
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: Employers across the board care about money—and saving it. Including the frequency of your actions give a great sense of scale, but an even more eye-catching way to do this is to talk about the bottom line.
Think about all the things you do that ultimately save your company money, whether it’s streamlining a procedure, saving time, or negotiating discounts with vendors. Multiply those actions by how frequently you do them, and pop them into your resume bullets (remembering, again, that rough numbers are OK). For example:
Before: Streamlined inspection process by upgrading sensing and marking devices.
After: Managed project to upgrade defect sensing and marking devices, resulting in the elimination of human inspection online, saving $200,000 to $350,000 per year.
Or, if you’re more of a people-person and less of a figures-person, consider adding how many people you interact with or serve. Even soft skills come to life with a few numbers thrown in. For example:
Before: Responsible for chairing the Student Event Promotional Committee.
After: Chaired promotional committee of 12 and presented marketing plans to an audience of 40 to 60 students at weekly university senate meetings open to all 2,000 community members.
