What Separates a Good Resume from a Great Resume? Specifics.

Generalizations, no matter how professional or smooth they sound, don’t communicate anything. Here’s a free resume tip: the point of a resume is to communicate as much relevant information about your work history in as few words as possible. To do this, you need to use specifics. To do that, you need to quantify as much as possible. If there is one thing that can automatically take your resume from poor to good, or from good to great, it’s quantification. Here are some easy quantification resume tips.

One of The Greatest Resume Tips: Quantification 101

Quantification is the simple act of putting numbers to everything. This is an important resume tip for two reasons (notice how I didn’t say “a few” reasons.) The first is that unless you quantify something, hiring people don’t know if you did that thing once, and are using it to beef up your resume, of if you did it all the time as a regular part of your job. If you don’t distinguish between the two, hiring people are going to assume that it’s the former, not the latter. That’s not good.

The Count, giving invaluable resumes tips to Big Bird, who is clearly looking for a job (see the tie).

The second important reason to quantify everything is that you want to look like the type of person who has numbers for everything they’ve done. This shows attention to detail, organizational skills, and the ability to communicate, three things that everyone puts on their resume but nobody actually demonstrates. So don’t forget these resume tips: Quantification shows you have these skills. It shows you keep track of your work and are accountable for everything you do. If you have numbers for everything, your resume is already superior to all of those that don’t.

Five Easy Quantification Tips

1.     Give everything a number. If you don’t have a number for a task, say how often you did something. Was it a daily task?  A weekly task? A monthly task?

2.     Even if it seems ridiculous as you write your resume, quantify everything. You can get rid of numbers that are obvious or unimpressive at the end. Say how long the reports were. Say how many people you managed. Quantify everything.

3.     It’s better to give a range than to not use a number at all. “Resolved between twenty and forty daily help desk tickets” is much better than “Resolved help desk tickets.”

4.     Feel free to estimate, but whenever possible, don’t use “approximately,” “around,” or “more than.” That’s hedging. Saying an exact number demonstrates confidence. The number doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s implied it’s an estimate.

5.     If you say you improved something, you need to say by how much. “Streamlined workflow processes and reduced request processing time” sounds like filler. “Streamlined workflow processes and reduced request processing time by 20%” sounds like an accomplishment.

So there are a few good Resume Tips and that is certainly enough to get you started. While these are very simple tricks, finding ways to maximize quantification can be tough. Good thing your friends at Resume to Interviews are always ready to lend a helping hand. Or 7.5.