If you are looking for your next exciting role, then your CV needs to be nothing short of perfect.
After all, once you have a certain level of experience under your belt, recruiters expect to see a strong set of hard skills and some measurable results carefully demonstrated on your CV.
This requires you to clearly articulate your accomplishments and include achievement-driven points demonstrating your value. The most effective way to do this is to incorporate key metrics and KPIs into your CV, to help employers see the true value you can bring to them. Here are five examples of key metrics to include on your CV that will give you the competitive edge.
Financial figures
Finance fuels business. Without revenue, organisations simply cannot keep going. This is why adding financial metrics to your CV can instantly grab the recruiter’s attention, particularly when giving specific figures or percentages.
So if, for example, you’ve played an important role in boosting revenue or driving sales in the past, you should certainly shout about this.
But it’s not just about making money; as you know, reducing business expenditures and budgets also increases overall profit. Therefore, you could also include examples of how you have helped the business to save money by contributing to cost-saving initiatives or cutting spending.
Remember, it’s important to use numbers to quantify your value throughout your CV, but certainly when it comes to finances. So, rather than simply stating that you drove sales, be more specific by giving examples like ‘closed 20 new deals in the last quarter, resulting in £15,000 revenue (22% above my target)’.
Time management
Time is a company’s most precious resource, which is why time management is another crucial skill businesses look for. From reducing the burden of time-consuming processes, to prioritising workloads and completing projects ahead of deadlines, there are lots of ways you can - and should - demonstrate your time management abilities.
Though these can be a little trickier to quantify, today’s data-driven world affords you plenty of opportunities to gather and analyse data to determine the impact you’ve had on the business.
With all of this data to play with, it could be as simple as explaining how you finished each project an average of three weeks ahead of schedule. Alternatively, you could go into more detail given examples like ‘identified two major bottlenecks in the recruitment process and implemented new hiring tools and strategies to overcome this, resulting in 25% faster time-to-hire.
Customer satisfaction
Customers are the lifeblood of any business, which is why showcasing customer satisfaction metrics can make you instantly more employable. Customer service achievements will vary depending on your experience and the industry you work in. Still, these could include facts, such as customer satisfaction survey results, or the number of customer queries you dealt with.
For example, you could mention your team’s 97% customer satisfaction record’ or how you ‘resolved 80% of customer queries within the first three hours of receiving them’.
Product or service improvement
In today’s competitive market, businesses must constantly innovate and update their offerings or services if they hope to stay ahead of the competition. This is why professionals who can leverage data and customer insights to develop new products or services are highly sought-after.
Product or service updates also show creativity and innovation, so showcasing these skills using metrics wherever possible is important. This might mean highlighting the number of new products you helped to launch, successful marketing campaigns or how you improved user experience in a flagship product.
An example of this could be ‘successfully launched five new products in two years’ or ‘used customer feedback to improve user experience measures by 25% last quarter’.
Colleague happiness
A friendly and supportive workforce typically means higher productivity and customer satisfaction rates. Plus, helping others, particularly colleagues, requires a certain skill set, often including those all-important transferable and interpersonal skills. This is why employers look for professionals who can mentor their colleagues and help them to progress, as well as collaborating with them effectively on projects or supporting their wellbeing and happiness in the workplace, or whilst working remotely.
Now, you might need to think a little outside of the box with this one, but you can still quantify achievements related to colleague happiness. An example of this might be discussing how many co-workers or direct reports you have trained or mentored, giving the exact number if possible.
Alternatively, you could think about how to show off your collaboration skills with more detailed metrics like ‘supported the sales team with relevant marketing materials, increasing social selling by 23%’.
Although you need to think carefully about what metrics you include on your CV, by quantifying your achievements wherever possible, you make it much easier for the recruiter to see how you can add real value. And as you can see from the examples above, there are plenty of ways you can do this, just be sure to start by focusing on these five key metrics to make your CV stand out.