Quantifying Your Accomplishment Doesn't Have to Be Difficult

When you write a resume, several aspects of your past work go into the document including education, skills and accomplishments. Hiring managers need to see concrete examples of how you turned your everyday job into a success story for your previous employer. Quantify your accomplishments in creative ways to make recruiters notice.

You showed up for 40 hours every week for five years, but your resume may not say that you hypothetically stayed later on some days to help a department that faced shortfalls. Quantify your accomplishments by showing what happened as a result of your volunteer efforts in accounting after you put in your time in sales. Did accounting finish its big audit on time thanks to your extra hands? Explain to your prospective employer how you exceeded the goals your previous company set for you. Include a reference from the head of accounting, even though he was not your sales supervisor.

Quantify your accomplishments by comparing your company against the moxie of other businesses. State outright you worked as a marketing manager for a company that oversees $450 million in assets, as your accomplishment stands above someone who ran a small marketing team for a business that made $10,000 last month.

Compare yourself to others within the same company and quantify your accomplishments with a sales award, higher productivity, better revenue streams or your senior position on the management team. All of these assets show how valuable you became to a previous employer. No one else can claim these provable numbers except for you.

Consider big-name projects you oversaw, such as the $100 million Acme Brick account or the huge construction project down at the pier. Perhaps you trained 30 new employees during your tenure at Sales Corp, and those employees earned top bonuses over two years.

Learn to turn your daily tasks into something greater. When you put down that you worked well with customers, how does that quantify your accomplishments? Anyone can work with customers. However, your customer service skills may have led to 15 percent more conversions than the rest of your team. That shows how you turn everyday tasks into extraordinary accomplishments.

Use facts, figures, statistics and numbers to give recruiters something tangible to admire. State the marketing budget you maintained, the revenue you brought in, the inventory you sold or the money the company saved thanks to your efficiency project. Back up these numbers with your references, who can verify those were indeed part of your major accomplishments at a previous position.

The ability to quantify your accomplishments takes precedence above listing mundane, everyday tasks when you write a resume. The daily grind of a job leads to attaining goals, and you must show your prospective employer that you met that goal and went beyond.

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