One of the simplest and most effective resume strategies is to quantify your resume achievements with numbers and data. Here are recruiter-backed advice on how to do it with 50+ examples you can copy today!
3 years ago • 11 min read
A 2018 study found that recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds skimming through each resume they receive. When you’re applying for jobs, you only have that brief window to hook a recruiter’s attention — so your resume needs to pack a punch.
How do you create a memorable, impactful resume that will help you get more interviews in 2024? One of the simplest and most effective strategies is to quantify your resume achievements with numbers and data. We’ll break down that concept in more detail below.
According to the previously-mentioned study, many hiring managers prefer to see resumes with bulleted lists of achievements in the work experience section. These bullet points should be short, bite-sized, and easily scannable for quick reading. The most memorable and effective bullet points feature examples of your past achievements quantified with specific metrics, as in the resume sample below.
Notice how each bullet point references specific numbers (e.g. “reduced development costs by 25 percent”) in connection with the candidate’s achievements. These points are great examples of quantified achievements. The more quantified achievements you can include in your resume, the more you will stand out in a recruiter’s eyes.
There are many ways to add quantifiable metrics to the work experience bullet points of your resume. You should always choose numbers that are most relevant to your industry, whether it’s the amount of revenue you generated, the costs you reduced, or the processes you streamlined for greater efficiency. Here are some of the best and easiest ways to quantify your resume:
Ultimately, any recruiter who is considering hiring you wants to know: can you add to their bottom line? Are you going to be a profitable addition to their company? Showing how you’ve generated revenue, boosted sales, cut costs, or increased profit for past employers can make you a very desirable candidate.
Of course, this metric works best with sales and business positions that directly generate revenue — not all jobs lend themselves to being quantified in this way. But if you can measure your impact in the number of dollars you’ve brought in, don’t be shy about saying so.
You should aim to quantify most of your bullet points with numbers, metrics and data. I’d recommend trying out the tool below to check if your resume has enough uses of numbers, data and quantifiable accomplishments. It's a good litmus test to figure out if you’ve checked all the boxes from a hiring manager’s perspective.
Example bullet points:
You can use this versatile metric for any job where you’ve made a difference. If you’ve been in a marketing or similar role, you could discuss how you grew your brand’s readership or audience size. Or, in a customer service job, you could talk about how you achieved a reduction in customer complaints or negative online reviews. If you don’t know the exact percentage of the change you achieved, it’s okay to provide your best estimate.
You can also give examples of where you’ve improved processes or working conditions. Increasing productivity, employee satisfaction, and other aspects of the workplace can be very impactful for companies, so they’re valid metrics to call out in your resume.
Example bullet points:
You know the saying – time is money. Saving valuable company time can be as significant to the bottom line as directly saving money, which makes it an excellent thing to quantify on your resume. You can approach this on a small scale by detailing the number of hours you saved by streamlining the efficiency of your own projects, or on a larger scale by estimating the total number of man hours you saved for your company.
Example bullet points:
Running a two-person team or planning a dinner for 5 people is very different from overseeing a 500-person department or organizing an event for 200 attendees. Make the scale of your accomplishments clear to a hiring manager by including quantifiable metrics like the size of your department, event, budget, or data set.
Example bullet points:
You can also choose to focus on the quantity of work you completed – for example, the number of projects completed, number of employees onboarded, or training facilitated. This doesn't need to be an exact figure, giving a range or an approximate figure is fine.
Example bullet points:
It's one thing to say that you're a committed employee, but quite another to have the numbers to back it up. If you were promoted ahead of schedule, routinely go the extra mile to help out, or have a track record of putting in overtime to make sure important deadlines are met, and you don't mind doing the same at your next job, go ahead and include those accomplishments.
Example bullet points:
By now, hopefully, you’re starting to see what a powerful tool these quantified bullet points can be. They convey confidence and send a strong message to hiring managers about your ability to excel in a job.
But what if you already have a resume that’s riddled with unquantified bullet points? Not to worry — you don’t have to scrap the whole document and start fresh! Instead, you can rework each point, filling in more detail and adding those specific numbers to illustrate what you achieved, or use our handy bullet point builder to get you started.
Let’s look at a few “before and after” examples that will show you how to convert weaker, non-quantified bullet points into stronger, quantified ones. The weaker examples are vague and nonspecific, while the stronger ones are much clearer and more detailed.
Once you have decided how to quantify your skills, you want to present these numbers in a way that will grab a recruiter's attention. That’s where power phrases come in.
Creating a power phrase is simple. Choose a task or project where you demonstrated a skill and decide how to quantify that skill using one of the methods above. Then all you have to do is choose an action verb from our list to start your statement, and you have a strong power phrase to add to your resume. Use these phrases throughout your resume, particularly in your resume summary and work experience sections, and to optimize your LinkedIn profile.
Compare your phrases against the template below, or use our Score My Resume tool to analyze the impact of your statements and provide feedback on how to improve your word choice, impact, brevity and style.
Examples are always helpful, so here's a collection of resume bullet points that are correctly quantified and handpicked from successful resumes.
Pay close attention to the metrics and numbers used to quantify each bullet point. Like we discussed above, effective metrics can be dollar amounts (e.g. revenue, sales), size of teams of users (e.g. employees worked with), or percentages.
For more resume bullet points and templates, visit sample resume bullet points.
The best quantifiable achievements to choose vary depending on your industry. For instance, in sales, annual targets and increased revenue are good to focus on, while in education, innovative teaching methods and improved student test scores would be equally impressive. Similarly, streamlined workflows are great to highlight in project management, while in healthcare, you could mention the number of patient contacts or ongoing education credits.
Here are some more specific examples for various industries:
Hiring managers don’t just want to hear about your talent and abilities; they want to see proof of what you’ve actually accomplished in the past. They want to know that you’ve had a positive impact in your previous jobs and that you’re capable of excellent work.
When you quantify your resume accomplishments with specific numbers, you’re not just making empty claims about your skills and experience -- you’re backing your claims up with evidence. Quantified achievements are far more meaningful and concrete than vague statements about what you were “responsible for” at a previous job, and they can also help differentiate you from your competition.
When you’re quantifying your achievements, you may not always know the exact number of dollars you brought in or the percentage of growth you created. If that’s the case, don’t panic -- all you need to do is provide your best guess.
For example, if you upgraded some machinery and made your company’s operations more efficient, you could estimate how many hours of labor those new machines saved per week. To take it a step further, you could multiply these weekly labor hours by the average hourly employee pay to give a rough idea of how much money the machines saved.
In certain jobs, such as those where you help coach, mentor, and guide other people, it may be challenging to think of tangible, measurable achievements to list on your resume. In these cases, you could focus on metrics such as the number of clients you’ve served or new team members you’ve hired.
If you don’t have much work history yet, focus your resume on any relevant experiences you have had -- they could be courses you took in school, internships you’ve held, or extracurricular projects you’ve done. Recruiters know that those activities are valuable learning experiences, and they often teach you transferable job skills.
List these experiences on your resume as if they were jobs, and create bullet points for each one, as shown in the example below. Call out achievements that can be quantified, such as the number of donors you generated, networking events you organized, or students who participated in your training.
If you’re unsure of what skills to add to your resume, use the tool below to search for the role you’re applying to. It’ll let you know which skills are relevant to the job you’re applying to and which to add to your skills.
Some accomplishments are easier to quantify than others. If you worked in sales, finance, or anything else particularly number-driven, finding ways to quantify your accomplishments should be relatively easy. But what about people who work in positions that aren't so easily quantified?
Instead of adding numbers that don't relate to your core achievements just for the sake of data, try these strategies:
