Quantify and clarify accomplishments in your resume
Here's a line item you might see on a resume:
Focus on improving React frontend performance of components
and pages to reduce excessive rendering and optimize hot code paths. Search and listing pages time-to-interactive (TTI) improved by 8% YTD.
This isn't bad:
- It starts with an active tense
- It's specific about what was improved
- It quantifies the improvement
But it could be better. How?
- The quantified metric should be the absolute first thing to lead with
- It can lose the superfluous lower-level detail (unless it must be included, in which case I would only leave "React").
- It's talking only to developers who are not necessarily the first people who will see your resume
A better version could be:
Improve page interaction speed by 8% YTD for search and home pages
It's clearer what high-level metric was moved, what direction it went, and by how much. There's a high-level note about what we did that accomplished it. It's also avoiding technical jargon. Remember: if someone asks, you will have the opportunity to dive into detail.
Something's missing though: so what?
Tomorrow I'll answer that.
The first example was on my own resume. My business communications professor, Holly, would probably give it a B-.