How to "quantify" impacts on resume?

Hi, would give two points of guidance on this:  

1) Quantification isn't only about demonstrating your personal impact.  It can also give a good sense of the scale / size of the project and also helps to convey you as someone who is focused on business value.  Hence, in the case, for example, of digital strategy, there will have been an underlying business case (e.g. expected cost reduction, efficiency increase etc) that you should certainly reference.  

2) In the context of broader strategy projects the same point applies, but the ultimate KPI here is whether the CEO / board approved the recommendation, if a follow-on project(s) was sold, was an M&A target identified etc etc.  You can also talk more broadly about whether the client implemented your changes after you left and what the impact was.  Again, this is not necessarily about personal impact at the time, but the overall long-term impact on the business of your recommendations. 

Hi there,

Super common problem!

#2 you should absolutely do. You can absolutely say “delivered project on time” or “resulted in additional work/sales” or “optimized processes” or “drove and supported executive decision making”

Example from my old resume: Submitted proposal to implement analytics approach to school recruiting; collected and analyzed recruiting data using Tableau and Azure to provide detailed insights of factors affecting student recruiting and employment outcomes

#1 you “should” do but NOT inventing numbers. For example, “doubled output” or “reduced errors by 25%” or “increase sales by $10M+”.

As long as the baseline is doubling, or 25% or $10M, you're ok! You do not need exact numbers…but you can estimate the impact.

Example from my old resume: Optimized, streamlined, and enhanced processes for reporting of student job search status to the Dean of Students by leveraging Macros and excel techniques; reduced weekly reporting time from 3 hours to 10 minutes

Hope this helps!

Hi there, 

In short, if you can't quantify the outputs, the best thing that you can do is quantify the inputs. 

Give a sense of your efforts in numbers. 

OR

Try to give an indication of how your work contributed to a bigger goal which is quantifiable. 

Last but not least, don't overthink it. It's great if every bullet is quantifiable, but they don't absolutely ALL needs to be this way. So just make the best with what you have. 

Best,
Cristian

Hi there,

1) On a high level, what would be your suggestion? 

If you can’t find numbers, I would recommend one of the following options:

1) Intermediary results (eg “identified 3 key markets where to launch marketing campaign”)

2) Numbers unrelated to results (eg “led team of 5 people to..”) with qualitative impact (eg “client adopted recommendation and managed to achieve successful entry”)

3) Range/estimate/expected results instead of exact numbers (eg “led to expected/forecasted increase in revenues of $10M+ in Q4”)

2) Would either of these solution work? Estimate or even fake” an impact. State the impact qualitatively.

Estimates and qualitative impact are fine if you follow a structure like the one above. I would not recommend adding fake numbers though.

Best,

Francesco

Hello,

I think you got some great advice here! Not everything is quantifiable, just do the best with what you have. I think option #2 you lay out makes a lot of sense, but I would not do #1. There’s no need to make up numbers. 

Hi,

I've been in your situation before, I was in a T2 for 3 years and applied to MBB but also corporate strategy roles.

A couple of pointers from me:

• There is always a way to quantify the impact of your work
• The ‘impact’ is basically a way of substantiating the significance of your work
  • E.g. if you did all that analysis and work only to uncover $10 of cost savings for a client.. versus $10M of cost savings, the former implies that either you weren't focusing on the right levers and/or you weren't very effective at your job
• If the project has not yet been completed, the potential impact of your work can work as a proxy
  • E.g. a go/no-go decsion by the SteerCo or Board could function as a proxy for impact
  • But even in these situations, I would still encourage you to think about quantifying what these decisions were made on → in consulting there are very few projects that really do not have some quantifiable metric
• If there really is zero quantifiable impact, then arguably thats not a good example or project to take. Choose a different one. 

Lets take the two examples you mentioned 

1. Digital project: the project itself was to advise on an overall digital strategy without a specific “quantifiable goal”
   • Even in a strategy project, typically the answer (whether it is a strategy you are coming up with or sharing a POV on their existing strategy) is backed by some logic or reasoning and very often there has to be some quantifiable measures to this logic
   • Whether it is addressable customer base, or attacking a market of high growth, there must have be some numbers related to the business to prove that what you are recommending them to do actually moves the needle
   • If there really weren't any, then I would question the robustness of the advise you gave and whether that really was helpful or not. So then this sounds like a weaker example, and maybe consider picking another one instead
2. M&A target screening: helped the company to form an investment thesis, and suggested X targets in X segments. But again there are no quantifiable figures as the action has not happened.
   • M&A target screening is a fairly common project type for PE work
   • Describing the # of targets and the # of segments is one way of already one way of quantifying the impact here
   • But take a step back, in the world of PE projects, M&A target screening is never going to be as intense nor analytically deep as a full CDD. So if you have a CDD under your belt, its significantly better to put CDD there

All the best!