Make your resume stand out: 3 steps to quantify your achievements
In a competitive job market, job seekers need to identify creative ways to make their accomplishments stand out. A common practice for many is to use corporate-speak that’s loaded with buzzwords but short on substance. The best way is to quantify your achievements; the numbers provide a concrete illustration of what you’ve done and make your résumé more likely to catch a recruiter’s eye.
First, as we’ve written about previously, identify some function at your job that can be done more efficiently. Whether you process paperwork, enter data, or are responsible for developing and managing projects, there is surely something can be streamlined.
Second, come up with a way to automate that process. In some cases this may require knowledge of computer functions such as macros. For example, if you regularly copy and post data between programs or perform repetitive document formatting, write a macro to do it automatically. As we’ve said, these skills will give you a serious competitive advantage over everyone else who uses Office day in and day out. Even if you’re not up to taking on this kind of technical endeavor, you still can try to find a way to speed up the processes you perform.
Third, implement and show off your accomplishment. If your macro, database, or other idea cuts the time to process a piece of paperwork from 10 minutes down to eight, that’s a 20% reduction. Similarly, if you can now complete 12 projects each week instead of 10, that’s a 20% improvement. Bringing about these kinds of changes will reflect very favorably upon you, and it gets even better if another team or department adopts your idea for their own use. If two other people or groups also realize the ability to complete two additional projects per week, you can now claim credit for six additional projects instead of two, which of course looks even better.
To make an even larger visual impact, consider expressing your savings on an annual dollar basis. For example, if you cut paperwork processing time by 2 minutes per item, you can take that number times, say, forty items per day to get eighty minutes saved daily. That’s 400 minutes per week, about 347 hours (20,800 minutes) annually, and at $12 per hour, a bit under $4,200 saved annually, which really makes an impression. With these figures in hand, you can make your résumé shine.
Consider these generic and meaningless (but also unfortunately common) résumé lines:
- "Responsible for processing client paperwork in compliance with company policy."
- "Managed projects as assigned by supervisory staff."
- "Entered client data into corporate systems in an accurate and timely fashion."
With specific figures, your accomplishments are much clearer and likely to impress a hiring manager:
- "Reduced client paperwork processing costs by $4,200 annually."
- "Increased the rate of completed project deliveries by 20%."
- "Reduced data entry accuracy errors by 25%."
Quantifying your achievements gives you a way to stand out on the job and make your résumé more appealing. By including specific figures related to your accomplishments, you’ll give yourself a significant competitive advantage against others who simply rehash their own listed job duties.