You hear it all the time: Quantify your resume. But is it really that important? And how do you incorporate metrics into your resume when your past experiences aren’t inherently quantifiable?
Quantifying your resume gives hiring managers a concrete idea of the value you have brought to past employers. In an article for Forbes, recruiting expert Andrew Fennell says, “The most effective way to do this is to incorporate key metrics and KPIs into your CV, to help employers see the true value you can bring to them.”
Key metrics may differ depending on one’s industry or role. Somebody in sales, for example, may have more straightforward metrics, such as monthly sales growth or quote-to-close ratio. But success can be harder to quantify when it comes to tech.
Although quantifying your experience may not always feel natural in a tech resume, there are still key metrics you can tap into to demonstrate your value to hiring managers, and they all tie back to the bottom line.
[Read more about what Employers Look for in a Resume]
Quantify Your Value Using the Bottom Line
The bottom line represents more than a company’s net profit; it is the culmination of all the work performed by teams and individuals in their respective departments, whether or not their contributions are reflected using dollar signs.
Money
Of course, revenue generated is the most straightforward metric to represent your financial contributions. But in tech, it often makes more sense to share how your contributions saved money. An example might be: “Optimized server infrastructure, resulting in annual cost savings of $45,000.”
Time
If time is money, then time is essential to the bottom line. Say you reduced the time it took to complete a project; a bullet point may look like: “Implemented automation scripts, reducing manual data entry by 40 hours per week.” Or perhaps you increased the efficiency of a product, in which case you may include something like: “Reduced application’s load time by 30%.”
People
Even in a technical role, you likely worked with other people. Did you hold a leadership position? How many people did you oversee? How often did you meet with them? Consider including a bullet point like: “Oversaw a team of 10 employees, leading weekly team meetings centered around generating ideas to increase customer engagement.”
Rankings and Recognition
If you or your company received any accolades or recognition that can be traced back to your work, don’t be afraid to include it in your resume. If you work in tech recruiting or human resources, consider accolades like “Great Place to Work.” If you played a role in improving customer service rankings, you can include something like: “Increased customer service ranking from #42 to #12 across the span of 4 months by implementing automated customer service chatbot.”
Finding the Information
One of the biggest challenges of quantifying your resume is finding the information. These are a few routes you can take.
Third-Party Tools
In the IT field, metrics such as traffic, engagement, rankings, and load time are often recorded using third parties. Application performance monitoring (APM) is necessary for DevOps teams to track performance and manage applications, so you can likely find relevant metrics through APM tools, such as AppDynamics APM, Datadog APM, or Dynatrace.
Asking Peers and Colleagues
It is always a good idea to stay connected to former colleagues, not just for networking opportunities but for insight into your experience. For example, you may ask your old supervisor for your previous job description or any metrics they may have obtained during your time at the company.
Tracking Your Performance
Consider keeping a work journal to document the most important things you do each week and their impact. Even if metrics don’t come up, it is still useful to document your work and how it impacts your company’s success.
[Learn what skills we recommend you include in your resume, and which skills you should definitely leave out!]
How to Write It Out
It is one thing to determine the metrics you need to quantify your resume; it’s another to communicate these metrics in concise bullet points.
Think of a past role. What problems or situations did you face? What course of action did you take to address it? What was the result? These questions can be boiled down to the PAR method (problem, action, result) or the STAR method (situation, task, action, result).
When communicating actions, always try to use action verbs. With recruiters and hiring managers using AI to scan resumes in the early hiring stages, powerful word choice is more imperative than ever. Some examples of action verbs include:
- Reduced
- Generated
- Increased
- Managed
- Saved
Don’t Force It
You want to impress potential employers but not at the expense of authenticity. Like with buzzwords and jargon, hiring managers can see through resumes that use metrics arbitrarily.
Realistically, it may be hard to come up with exact numbers — that’s okay. Ballpark estimates are acceptable under certain circumstances. Say you’re describing an IT role you held over 10 years ago; you might not have the means to find exact numbers depicting the increased efficiency of a product or the number of projects you worked on.
A general rule of thumb: if you are at least 80 percent sure that your recollections are accurate, this estimate is likely okay to include. And if you are concerned about honesty, don’t be afraid to use the ≈ symbol.
Conclusion
Standing out among the competition requires concrete examples of your impact in past roles. However, it is undoubtedly challenging to quantify your value when metrics don’t present themselves naturally. By rethinking your impact in terms of how you contributed to the bottom line, you can uncover action-based, concise ways to communicate your value to potential employers, allowing them to envision how you will contribute to their bottom line.
