In this article we will talk all about quantifying your resume, from how to quantify resume to why and where, everything will be discussed. So without further wait, let's jump right in!
Importance of quantified resume
Quantified resume provides hard numbers. Hard numbers always make us believe the information. Numbers are specific which takes away the ambiguity and vagueness from any information.
When we are looking for some real information, we tend to scrutinize and try to get assurance for the credibility and validity of the information. The quantified resume with numbers help you impress and convince the recruiter that the information on your resume is credible and you are the right candidate for the job.
Without numbers, you are likely to be discarded or taken lightly because the resume reader will not have real numbers to go on from. Numbers are specific that can be verified, without numbers, the statement with words is something that may be deemed subjective thus not verifiable which renders them worthless.
Interesting fact:
(Source: https://www.wix.com/blog/psychology-and-numbers-how-to-effectively-use-them-in-your-marketing)
How to quantify resume achievements?
So we talked about what it means to quantify your resume and why you should quantify your resume. Now let's talk about how to quantify resume to achieve maximum positive impact on the hiring manager.
Achievements & responsibility
The easiest way you can quantify your resume is by using hard numbers to describe your achievements and usual job responsibility.
You can describe your achievements with numbers, use numbers to describe your usual responsibilities as well. Achievements may seem easier to quantify but here's how you can quantify your usual responsibilities.👇
- Waited on 50 customers per day at the restaurant
- Closed 15 deals in a single month
- Wrote 22 well researched articles per month
- Attended to 45 patients in the emergency ward per day
Measuring details
workload
Workload is the easiest aspect to quantify. There are two ways you can quantify the work load, amount of work and the amount of time that it took to complete the task. You can talk about how much work you handled on a daily basis and if you did overtime you can talk about how much of overtime you did.
For example, as a content writer you may mention the number of articles you wrote per week, as a graphic designer you can mention the number of graphics you created per week or how long it takes you to create a graphic image for a client with the brief and so on.
finances
There are many roles where you have to handle finances of business or company, there are many roles where you make an impact on finances or costs. If you handling money, you have to manage costs, supply, demand, budget and so on.
If your role has an impact on money or finances such as revenue generation and sales growth, your contribution makes all the difference for the business.
You need to quantify finance related aspects of your role and describe how you made a difference by handling the money well or contributing with your skills that led to financial success and results.
management
Management may seem like qualitative work but it can quantified as well. How many team members you managed, how many projects you managed, how much work you managed, costs you managed and success rate you accomplished as a manager.
results
Results! That's what anyone cares about when you are in the corporate world. You may have extensive work experience, excellent skills but the employers will only look for solid results with hard numbers and metrics.
You need to provide how you contributed to sales growth, revenue increase, success with desired profit margin and so on. You do not need to be an executive or manager to talk about such achievements. You may have been a waiter who had excellent communication skills which led to more customers coming to the restaurant which may have increased the revenue significantly.
You can mention how you increased the customer satisfaction and retention which led to more customers and revenue in a single month or per week and so on.
Providing numbers for results is not as difficult as one may think, every profession and role can be judged and defined with quantifiable achievements and results. It may be easier if you are in financial or medical profession such as accounts manager or doctor who attends OPD or a statistician or business manager.
Having said that, it is always possible to provide quantified results for any and every role. Whether it is a content writer or graphic designer or waiter or any other role. Just try to think about how you contributed and where you can include numbers.
Use bullet points
An important aspect of writing your resume to make impact is to use bullet points to describe hard numbers and quantifiable achievements. This shows employers exactly what they want to see, very easily instead of having to comb through textual paragraph for important relevant information.
Quantifying words
Quantifying means stating the amount of something which may seem to be possible only with numbers however you also need the related words to quantify details or describe quantifiable achievements through.
- Lead generation
- Leading the team
- Sales generation
- Revenue generation
- Sales growth
- Conversions
- Leading business success
- Contracts signed
- Turn over
- Customers' satisfaction
- Customer retention
- Established
- Achieved
- Process
- Productivity
- Costs
- Vendors deals
- Managed
- Average revenue
- Create sales strategy
- Accomplished targets
- Achieve target sales
- Data on additional revenue
- Money
- Company success
- Desired results per week
- Clients feedback
- Shift work experience
- New vendor contracts
- Closed deals
Provide context
Needless to say, when we give any numbers we provide some context. For example, when you say you like particular dish or movie, you provide the context in case you used some number. You provide some extra related information to make sense of what you said.
While describing your experience you might say:
- Increased sales by 45%
in such cases, you need to provide the context for example:
- Increased sales by 45% during my employment (2020-2022) compared to 2018-2020
OR
- Increased sales by 45% with the improved marketing strategy
The context is important because it adds value to what you claimed, it puts the detail of numbers in proper perspective.
Optimizing existing resume achievements
You need to understand that quantifying your resume is not for those who are about to write a new resume for a new job or such.
In case you already have a resume, you can optimize your existing resume with the quantifiable achievements as well. You may have described every detail very well but may not have included a lot of solid hard numbers.
You should try to recall your past jobs and ensure that you include numbers wherever possible. In case you do not have exact numbers and such details, you can always put estimates and average numbers on your resume. Those will still make a big difference for you.
Sections
Which sections to quantify?👇
Profile summary
You must put the most important quantifiable achievements on your profile summary in the beginning of the resume because it will help you grab the recruiter's attention.
Employers always look for evidence to back your claims in your resume, they scrutinize every detail and do not take any statement at face value. Which is why you need to highlight every detail with numbers of sales and productivity and projects and so on.
In the profile summary, you should focus on the most important details for which you have the most impressive hard numbers to increase the efficiency of the resume quantifying process.
Employers will be looking for what you bring to their business which means you need to showcase solid information on what you have managed and achieved.
Experience
The experience section is the obvious and mandatory section for quantifying the resume achievements. You can quantify your performance, your experience period, your results, your skills, the feedback from the employers and colleagues and much more.
Quantifying the aspects of your job such as projects' success rate, the time management, team members that you may have managed as a manager, money and finances that you may have handled, number of tasks you handled, number of clients or customers you dealt with or number of queries you handled or amount of content or articles you created and so on.
Make sure you don't forget to use bullet points when you describe these details in experience description. You can also quantify various other aspects such as sales, revenue, how many people you supervised or trained, hard numbers of accomplishments, examples of your strategies, results of your strategies, productivity, costs management and process efficiency, success rate of services, leads generated, negotiating figures and success you achieved with that and much more.
These metrics and hard numbers make a huge impact on the hiring manager or recruiter because it leads them to think that you have provided real results and your claims are not baseless or generic. It helps you increase the credibility of every detail on your resume, especially the credibility of the resume achievements.
This also helps you make the recruiter notice your resume with interest rather than a superficial look, your accomplishment and details of what you achieved, will make you stand out from other applicants and candidates.
Education
Your education section may not have in depth information that is lengthy in case you have extensive experience to convince the hiring managers of your capability to do the job and perform well.
Sometimes however, when a fresher or recent graduates are looking for a job, they do not have a lot of experience or any experience at all which means they have to focus and expand on education information.
In any case, if you wish to quantify the education section, you can easily do so. To quantify you have options of details such as your grades, your average performance, your participation in extra curricular relevant activities, your rank in your class and batch and so on.
Skills
There are various ways to describe skills on the skills section of your resume, depending on the resume format and your preferences, you may choose the put a small description to back the skills or list the skills without any description or put skills with metrics.
If you want to quantify skills on your resume, you can list the skills that are most relevant and important along with being your strength. While listing the skills you can put the percentages along with it in bars or such format. The percentage of your expertise, your level and your strength when it comes to the particular skill.
Conclusion
In conclusion, your professional resume needs to make an impact on the hiring managers that would convince them to hire you.
There are many ways to do that such as putting important words on your resume, putting your achievements and work experience along with relevant skills on your resume and most importantly, quantifying as many details as possible.
We humans tend to believe information when it is backed with solid numbers because it gives more clarity that can be verified instead of an ambiguous and vague claim.
Quantifying your resume and putting quantifiable achievements on your resume is helpful it has the desired impact on the hiring managers.
We have discussed all the tips and tricks of quantifying your resume so now you are ready to write your resume and quantify it maximize your chances of getting hired by impressing the hiring managers. You can also check out our resume examples, templates and resume writing guides collection. All the best.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What does it mean to quantify the resume?
Quantifying your resume means using as many numbers as possible along with action verbs to optimize your resume. You can use numbers to describe your performance results and contribution.
Which sections should be quantified on my resume?
You can add measured details throughout your resume, especially the profile summary, experiences, skills and any extra sections you may have.
Which details should I quantify on my resume if I'm a student?
You can quantify the details such as your academic performances(grades and results), your contribution to projects, your internship experiences, your skills involving time management and such other aspects of your profile.
