Optimize Your Resume: Quantify Accomplishments to Attract Employers (With Examples)

In today's competitive job market, a standout resume is crucial to catching the eye of potential employers and producing more interviews. One of the most effective ways to elevate your resume is by quantifying your accomplishments. Numbers and measurable results provide concrete evidence of your skills and achievements and help employers gauge your potential impact quickly. This article will guide you through the process of transforming your resume by incorporating quantifiable accomplishments, complete with examples to illustrate how you can make your experience and successes shine.

Quantifying your skill statements means describing how you have used your skills (transferable, personal, and content skills) using numbers, dollars, and percentages. Quantified skill statements can significantly impact the effectiveness of your resume and interviews, enabling you to illustrate in writing and verbally how you can meet the employer's needs. Ultimately, this can result in more job offers. For example, let's say that Kathy is interviewing for an office manager position. Part of her responsibilities would be to train new workers to use particular software programs. Which of the following statements would impress an employer more?

Typical statement: "Trained employees on various software programs."

Quantified skill statement: "Trained two administrative assistants to use the more advanced features of Excel. Within one week, those trained improved their Excel skill level by 100 percent."

Which of these statements will convince the employer that you would be an excellent person to hire? Of course, the second quantified skill statement is much more powerful in convincing the employer that the person can meet their needs and would be an excellent employee.

We recommend quantifying skill statements for your ten to fifteen most relevant transferable skills for your job target. You can identify these transferable skills by analyzing your target's typical job requirements.

As demonstrated above, try to quantify your skill statements with numbers, percentages, and dollars (#, %, $) whenever possible. Indicate the results you achieved in terms of dollars (amount sold, dollars saved, money raised, etc.) or percentages (amount increased or decreased) or numbers/amount (number of clients, students, programs, etc.). If you are unsure of exact figures, you can estimate the results and use terms like "approximately" or "more than."

The only reason that employers hire you is because of the results that you can produce. When employers read about your results, they can better picture how you could produce similar results.

While you always want to ask yourself what the results of using each transferable skill were, typically, you can only quantify some of your skill statements. There will be many skill statements that you can't quantify. You can, however, describe a result in more general terms for those skill statements. For example, an aspiring accountant wrote a skill statement from her internship: "Developed and implemented financial policies and procedures to ensure accurate financial reporting in a timely manner." While this statement is not quantified with numbers, percentages, or dollar figures, it does describe a result of “accurate financial reporting in a timely manner."

More Examples of Quantified Skill Statements

Job Target: Graphic Designer. Skill: Design/Create

Example 1: Created promotional brochure for a non-profit special event attended by 500 people. The event raised more than $100,000.

Example 2: Designed a 120-page training manual for the sales department using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. Received feedback that the materials were practical and visually appealing.

Job Target: Commercial copier repair technician. Skill: Repair/Service

Example 1: Repaired more than 15 different types of copier and multi-function machines successfully.

Example 2: Reduced the cost of repairing office machines by approximately 20% by accurately determining which parts needed to be refurbished instead of replaced with new parts.

Besides your resume, your quantified skill statements can be used to develop other marketing tools, including cover letters, elevator speeches, and LinkedIn profiles. We suggest you start with your Targeted Resume, as the work you put into developing a great resume can be used in all the other marketing tools.

Summary

Developing quantified skills statements is a building block for an effective resume. You can also use them in your cover letters, LinkedIn profile, and interviews as you describe how you can meet the employer's needs. Writing quantified skill statements takes time but can result in employers choosing you over other candidates.