Quantify Your Experience These 3 Ways

It's essential to quantify your experience on your resume. This means including numerical data with experiences to give prospective employers a clearer picture as to how you helped previous organizations meet goals. Discover three ways to add substance to your resume using hard numbers to impress hiring managers.

1. Frequency

Information about frequency relays how often you accomplished a certain task. Quantify your experience with a top-level contribution in your resume's Career Summary by relaying statistics over a period of time. For example, you might have "Increased sales at Acme Brick 5 percent per month for 36 straight months." The frequency in this statement comes from the 36 straight months. You didn't just increase sales for one month, but you or your team did so for three straight years.

Another thing to keep in mind when you quantify your experience is the money factor. Your statement about 36 straight months of sales objectifies how much money you brought into the company. Sure, organizations are all about people, but the bottom line is that employers want and need to make money.

2. Scale

The scale and scope of your skills should relay how you helped the company save or earn money. An employer invests money in you, so when you quantify your experience with scale, you are telling an employer that you replicate your results over and over again. For example, you might have "Automated Acme Brick's sales pipeline to reduce labor costs by 25 percent."

This simple statement does several things. It shows you saved a previous employer money, and it also shows that you accomplished this feat over and over again. Automation means you replicated the process, and Acme brick didn't go back to its old way of doing things. Saving 25 percent in labor costs was a permanent fix to a solution.

3. Range

If you're not sure of an exact number, list a range of numbers to get it close. This also comes in handy if the numbers did not stay constant during your tenure with a previous employer. Consider, "Supervised a group of 6 to 15 people over three years with a goal of making internal processes more efficient while increasing sales."

Even when you can't remember exact numbers, a range suffices to give a prospective employer a better picture of your abilities. Quantify your experience by showing that things improved or changed over time and that you accepted challenges as they presented themselves. Note how the range of teammates shows how your subordinates doubled sometime in those three years. That relays the fact that your managerial skills did not remain stagnant and you improved on your skills as you supervised more people.

Companies love numbers, which is why you must quantify your experience in relevant ways on your resume. These three ways demonstrate how to quickly and easily put hard numbers into bullet points as you prop up your personal brand to hiring managers.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net