One of the most common lines I find in resumes is “Implemented features and bugfixes”, but this line adds zero value because…
it is vague and it tells the hiring manager absolutely nothing about the impact of your work; literally any engineer could have added this line to their resume and it still would have made sense.
It is important to showcase real-world outputs and outcomes in your resume and this is best done by quantifying the outcome of your work. Two simple templates that you can leverage -
- improved X by Y%
- improved X by doing Z
Instead of writing “worked on recent searches”, I write “improved CTR by 42% by implementing recent search feature”. This is where I have shown the needle-moving impact of my work.
Even in the case of fixing a bug, you should quantify against the error it was causing, maybe the number of errors, the number of users impacted, or anything usecase specific - eg: reduced transaction failures by 80% by resolving issue X.
By the way, you should know your numbers, and if you don’t ask your manager, or product manager, or refer to the monitoring tool.
Remember, the goal of quantification is not to inflate the achievements, but to accurately represent the value you bring to a table. By quantifying your impact, you’re not only showing what you can do but why it matters.
Thinking in numbers shifts your mindset and makes you think and focus on outcomes instead of outputs.