The advice to "quantify everything" pushes people into inventing figures. If you do not have a measurement, describe the work precisely instead — and never estimate a number you could not defend.
Evidence that is not a percentage
- Scope: how many people, teams, customers, systems or countries were involved.
- Complexity: what constraints made the work hard — legacy systems, regulation, a deadline.
- Change: what was true before, and what was true afterwards.
- Ownership: what you decided rather than what you were assigned.
A pattern that works
Action, object, constraint, outcome. "Consolidated three regional invoicing processes into one, during a finance-system migration, so month-end no longer required manual reconciliation." No figure, but nothing vague.
When you do have numbers
Use the real one, name the baseline, and keep the timeframe. A modest, specific, verifiable figure is more persuasive than an impressive one nobody can trace.
Related reading
- How to tailor a CV to a job description
A practical method for rewriting a CV around one specific role: read the posting properly, map evidence to requirements, and reorder for relevance.
- CV vs resume: what to send, and when
The two words mean different things in different countries. Here is how to decide which document a given employer expects — and why keeping both is useful.
- How ATS-friendly CVs actually work
Applicant tracking systems parse text. Here is what that means for structure, headings and formatting — and what nobody can honestly guarantee.
Put this into practice
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