How Software Engineers Can Show Impact on a Resume
In a job market as competitive as it has been in the last few years, taking standard actions such as listing your responsibilities within your roles or mentioning the tech stack you used is no longer enough to have your resume looked at in a sea of applicants.
Hiring managers and recruiters see countless resumes from candidates who have worked on a team or developed software in JavaScript. In order to create a resume that is actually read by hiring teams, you need to quantify your impact. In other words you have to show that you are someone who can produce concrete results with numbers to back them up.
In this article, I will show you how you can create your resume as a software engineer in a way that will compel hiring teams to want to look at you as a candidate.
Here we’ll discuss both why it matters to add concrete impact numbers to your resume as well as how to go about doing so in an effective way. We’ll also talk about what to avoid when building a resume and we will talk about general resume best practices for software engineers. Lastly we’ll talk about some key differences between how certain types of software engineers should approach constructing their resume.
Why Quantifying Your Achievements Matters
Numbers grab people’s attention. Quantifying what you’ve accomplished provides clarity and specific actions in a way that cannot be conveyed by typical general phrases found in most resumes.
For example some resumes might say a phrase like significantly increased client acquisition. You can convey that same idea in a more impactful way with numbers to back it up by instead saying oversaw a 37% growth in new client acquisition in a year. This new phrasing leaves no room for the reader to be able to misinterpret what you have accomplished and the precise impact you made.
Metrics build a sense of credibility. Including data implies that you have evidence to back up the claims you make. It makes you more believable, and rather than simply stating something that happened, you are showing how much you have improved it. Additionally, it signals to potential employers that you care about results and pay attention to how your work impacts others.
Impact is sticky in people’s memory. Numbers and specific outcomes stay in people’s minds more than bullet points that do not have those things. Recruiters often skim dozens or even hundreds of resumes and might spend only a few seconds at a time on any given resume. Specific facts with numbers will stand out amongst the pack both visually and mentally to people who read resumes. There are even eye tracking studies that show that resumes that have clean formatting and bulleted accomplishments with metrics hold attention longer than dense text and accomplishments without impact metrics.
How to Effectively Quantify Your Accomplishments
If you have a resume, changing it to have impactful metrics can be a challenging task to think about at first. Here are some strategies you can use along with examples to help you craft a resume with impact focused bullet points.
Distinguish responsibilities from results. Instead of thinking first about what you did in each role, think about the outcomes of your work. A responsibility is what you did whereas an accomplishment is what happened as a result of performing those actions.
For example, a responsibility might be something like implemented weekly team meetings. Then the corresponding accomplishment might be streamlined weekly team meetings, reducing overall meeting time by 25% while improving cross-team collaboration.
When listing a bullet point on your resume, always ask yourself what was the result of that task. Did it save time? Perhaps it increased efficiency somehow, or improved user satisfaction metrics. And it may sound obvious but focus on highlighting outcomes that showcase success rather than failure.
Choose metrics that are relevant for your roles or desired roles. In tech roles, impact can be measured in a multitude of ways. Revenue increase is one way but there are several more that are not directly about money. Below are some example types.
Time saved: Perhaps you automated some process or reduced execution time of a portion of software. For example, reduced data processing time by 50%.
Efficiency or performance gains: If the work you did produced faster load times, higher throughput, or lower resource usage be sure to highlight that as well. An example might be decreased page load time by 30%.
Scope or scale increases: Note increases in volume of data or users handled, or number of features built.
Team and Collaboration: Mention if you helped grow the number of people on your team or if you played a significant role in onboarding or mentoring a new team member.
Quality and Reliability: Mention if you have resolved some number of open defects in the code base or increased uptime of an application or increased customer satisfaction.
Overall Customer or User Impact: Certainly note bullet points on your resume if you increased how many users use the application you coded or you increased engagement metrics somehow.
The above types of metrics are a guide and it is OK if not every metric hits all of those points. Even a small improvement in one of these areas can be compelling if it aligns with something the hiring team values in a candidate.
Another point to make is don’t leave out metrics that seem “boring” if they are effective like if you reduced internal team support tickets or if you improved the deployment pipeline.
Whenever possible, try to before how things were before you involved vs how they ended up after you were involved. Saying something like improved system uptime to 99.9%is alright but it would be even more effective to say improved system uptime from 99.0% to 99.9%since that shows what the end result is relative to the previous result.
Highlight the scale of your contributions even if it is not all necessarily due to the actions you specifically took. Sometimes you might work on a project where you can’t quite isolate your individual contributions in numbers. In such cases, you can still quantify the scope or potential impact of the project. Some examples that utilize this are below.
Developed feature for app with over 2 million users
Contributed to a project expected to save the business $500K annually
Use strong action verbs along with your metrics numbers. Make sure to start each resume bullet with a powerful verb that conveys action and ownership on your end. Some good words to use for this start are below.
Implemented
Optimized
Led
Automated
Designed
Resolved
Then follow the verb with a specific task or outcome.
Tailoring Impact Metrics to Different Engineering Role Types
While the principle of quantifying your achievements applies universally across software engineering, the most relevant metrics can differ depending on the type of role.
For example, a data scientist’s resume will likely look different from a web developer’s resume and the goal is to highlight the forms of impact that best demonstrate your fit for the specific type of position you are targeting. Below are some examples of effective metrics broken down by role type.
Front-end Web Developers: Emphasize improvements to user experience and growth. This can include web performance metrics such as page load times and latency reductions. Examples might be improved homepage load time by 2 seconds, boosting conversion rate by 15%orincreased weekly active users by 25% through a UI redesign.
Infrastructure Engineers: Focus on performance, scalability and reliability metrics. Common examples include response time reductions, throughput increases, system uptime or availability, and capacity handled. One example might be Refactored service architecture to cut API latency from 200 ms to 50 ms. Another example might be implemented caching layer that enabled handling 10k requests per second up from 2k requests per second. Even internal efficiency wins count such as automating deployment scripts or reducing deployment time by some amount.
Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers: If you are in these types of roles, try your best to highlight model performance and business impact. This means model accuracy or error rates with relevant metrics like accuracy, F1 score, and AUC. Also highlight improvements over any previous benchmarks and how that translated to business value. One example of this might be improved model precision from 88% to 94%, increasing fraud detection recall by 10 percentage points. The most important note here is to do anything in your power to tie your data work to bottom line business results. An additional consideration is to highlight any improvements in amount of data that can be handled or growth in data processing speed.
DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers: Emphasize stability and efficiency metrics for these roles. Think in terms of deployment frequency, CI/CD improvements, system reliability improvements and cost savings. Great types of metrics to highlight include Mean Time to Recovery, reduced outage counts, faster build and deploy times, infrastructure cost reductions and automation status. One example metric might be implemented monitoring and alerting, reducing incident response time from 1 hour to 10 minutes. These types of metrics can reassure employers that you can keep critical systems running smoothly and efficiently.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Quantifying Impact
Don’t invent metrics or put wild guesses. Any number you put on your resume should indicate the truth and something you can explain in greater detail if asked about it. Never make up statistics out of thin air just to sound impressive.
Avoid irrelevant or trivial metrics. Not every number adds value just by virtue of being a number. You should focus on metrics that demonstrate value or improvement and not just any count. A classic example of an irrelevant metrics is lines of code written. More code is not always better. Actually reducing the amount of code is often better. The rule here is quality over quantity. Use metrics that reflect positive outcomes or efficiency improvements rather than vanity metrics.
Provide detailed context for bigger numbers. If you put some large number on your resume, add context to it to avoid skepticism from hiring teams. You might be able to say something like managed budget of $10 million is fine but it is probably better to say delivered project on budget of $10 million saving 25% in costs year over year. Also remember that percentages and absolute numbers can both work together to tell a story. Without context a number might seem either too small or unbelievably large, so add a brief explanation in those situations.
Never neglect the “so what” factor. Any metric you add should answer the question of why does this matter. If you reduced CPU usage by 30%, was it to support more users? If you onboarded 3 new developers, did that help the team deliver more quickly? Make sure that the reader can see the benefit behind each metric.
Putting It All Together
Writing an accomplishments filled metric packed resume takes more effort than writing a generic one, but the payoff is worth the effort. By doing this, you’re proving your value to prospective employers. Each number provides a story in itself. You identified a problem, you solved it, and this is how we know it worked. This level of detail can quickly convince hiring managers that you are someone who delivers results and not just tasks.
