How to Use Numbers on Your Resume to Impress Hiring Managers

Incorporating numbers into your resume is a crucial step in ensuring a readable and effective document. Numbers break up the lines of text, drawing the readers’ eyes to contextualized daily duties and metric-backed achievements that get right to the heart of your qualifications. However, it can be difficult to quantify your career history, especially if you aren’t in a numbers-driven industry like sales or engineering. Read on to learn how to use numbers on your resume.

How Do You Put Data on a Resume?

Numbers provide clarification on the scope of a business, a job, or a project. One common way to include numbers in your job description paragraph is to discuss the metrics of the company. This can be a mention to the yearly revenue or the number of employees, locations, clients, patients, students, or groups that encompass those administering or receiving services. Here are some examples of a job description paragraph that begins with a data-backed company description.

How to Quantify Your Work – Company Description Examples:

• “Hired as Cashier to man registers, aid customers, and ensure smooth operations for 7^th-largest retail department store in the US, Target.”
• “Supervise 7 employees including Managers, Assistant Manager, and 3 team members at local health clinic with $2.3M in annual revenue.”
• “Recruited to ensure overall compliance for privately owned community bank serving 4 counties and 14,000 residents.”

Daily responsibilities can be hard to revise into numbers, but the results often add credence and weight to what would otherwise be a vague statement. Instead of “Provided therapy to 10 people,” try: “Provided high-quality, patient-centered, customized care to 10 individuals, families, and groups with diverse needs.” Maybe 10 is a small caseload, but now the added context of high-quality care elevates that number.

Because most people aren’t considering their daily duties in quantifiable objectives, it can be hard to know the exact numbers you need. An estimate or average is always fine, so long as it’s in the realm of possibility. On the other hand, some will begin to describe a daily occurrence and discover it may belong more in the achievement category. Maybe you helped to relocate data from one server to another, or you helped to physically move the company. It was a regular part of your job, but if you add numbers to it, it can be much more impressive.

How to Quantify Your Work – Daily Duty Examples:

• “Selected to fulfill interim leadership role out of 4 other employees due to exceptional work ethic.”
• “Transferred 50K MBs of data with no downtime.”
• “Facilitated office relocation over 4 weeks by identifying leasing requirements, obtaining permits, organizing logistics, and hiring necessary help.”
   

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You can also use metrics or data when referring to timelines, budgets, or contracts. This can be helpful in construction resumes, in describing projects that have similar scopes, or when discussing a steady level of activity/growth. The following are quantifying resume examples made from seemingly benign tasks or accomplishments.

How to Quantify Your Work – Achievement Examples:

• “Complete ~10 window treatments each month, finalizing all jobs on time with high rate of customer satisfaction.”
• “Redesigned 23K sq. ft. office building in under 8 months while within budget to include updated water heating system, new plumbing, and state of the art electrical equipment.”
• “Consistently grew client portfolio by 2% each month through steady relationship building and knowledgeable persistence.”
• “Successfully cleared approximately 10 years’ worth of backlogged orders, dedicating downtime over the course of 3 months to fulfill task.”
• “Maintained 90% retention of staff throughout COVID-19 Pandemic.”
• “Increased personal response time by 1.25 seconds through continued practice.”
• “Sustained 3.72 GPA while simultaneously working 20 hours per week at local bookstore.”
• “Served average of 30 covers per weeknight/45 covers per weekend at high-volume, fine-dining establishment.”

Ultimately, there are almost always numbers you can attach to your career history. You just have to know where to look, and how to dig further to find them. If you need help brainstorming or want to talk through how to use numbers on your resume, schedule a free 15-minute Resume Analyst call with a member of iHire’s highly knowledgeable staff.