Personal Finance | Interview Answers | Winning CVs | Beat the Recession

Curriculum Vitae Advice

How to impress by numbers, using sales figures, savings, turnaround times and other relevant metrics.

Quantifying the business impact of your actions will do wonders in terms of impressing a potential employer.

Did you know that the Charge of the Light Brigade, generally regarded as a catastrophic British military blunder, was actually nothing of the sort? According to Terry Brighton, author of a book about the battle, some 60% of the men who took part returned 'without a scratch' and judged the encounter to be a success. I mention this not out of any revisionary zeal, but because I want to pick up on the phrase 'some 60% of the men who took part'. If instead of specifying '60%' the sentence stated 'quite a few' or 'the majority', would the sentence's meaning be conveyed as well? Let's face it, '60%' appears precise and unambiguous in a way that 'quite a few' most certainly isn't.

Now I know that numbers shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value either. It's sometimes said that there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Then of course there's that jibe that's often hurled at politicians, namely that they use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post - for support rather than illumination. However, these caveats aside, most people accept that numbers can carry a weight and conviction that mere words often struggle to emulate.

AVOID AMBIGUITY

Use as much quantification as possible and you'll give your CV genuine impact and authority. In contrast, there are words that can disguise a range of possible truths and these should be avoided at all costs. For example, what does it really mean when somebody writes that they 'manage a small team'? Assuming we're not talking Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs here, the unvarnished truth could be 'I manage 30 people', in which case you might be underselling yourself depending on how the reader interprets 'small', or it could be 'I share one admin assistant with two other people', in which case the phrase 'weasel words' pops to mind.

Another example is, 'I introduced a more efficient system for managing overtime and achieved a significant saving for the department.' Does that mean that the applicant saved 250,000 a year or thirty bucks?

QUANTIFICATION IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

Opportunities to use quantification include:

The number of people employed by the company
Company turnover
Division turnover
Size of budgets you were responsible for
Number of people managed
Money you've saved the organisation
Improvements in turn-around times
Improvements in productivity
Improvements in levels of customer satisfaction
Performance against sales targets
Reduction in backlogs
Achieving something against a tight timescale

And here are four examples of quantified achievement statements:

Designed and successfully implemented a new set of shift rosters, reducing the department's wage bill by 12%.
Took over an ailing business and turned an annual loss of 8 million into a profit of 23 million within two years.
Exceeded sales target for the last financial year by 38%.
Increased the customer complaints dealt with within 24 hours from an average of 73% in 2003 to 98% in 2004.

Of course, in order to include some relevant metrics in your CV you'll need to have access to the data. So, if you don't already have these numbers to hand, now's a good time to start rummaging through the departmental filing system.


Custom Search