How to Quantify Your Achievements: A Practical Guide to Adding Metrics to Your CV & Performance Review

Learn How to Quantify Your Impact: Metrics for CVs & Reviews

You’re half-watching Netflix but your brain’s looping two ugly thoughts:

• “Performance review drops next week and I’ve got zero hard numbers.”

• “Time to polish the CV… but my impact column is a ghost town.”

Breathe. I’ve got you.

Here is a meme for morale and proof any job sounds sexier once you tack on numbers ↓

Why Metrics Matter

Recruiters and EMs skim for digits first. It just helps differentiate quickly.

No metrics → they assume no impact or your CV lands miles softer than the CV who lists “Cut costs 30 %”.

Good news: you can still surface or estimate numbers, even if dashboards are MIA.

(That’s the core idea. Read it twice.) 

Let's dive right in 

5-Step “Metric-Magic” Playbook 

#1 - Mine the Exhaust: GitHub deploy counts, CloudWatch uptime, Jira story-points.

#2 - Derive Defensible Estimates: Time saved = (old hrs − new hrs)/old hrs × 100.  Round, label, own the maths.

#3 - Scale Beats Silence: Quote volume: “Served 15 M API calls at 99.95 % uptime.”

#4 - No Numbers? Ask / Instrument: Ping product or spin up a log counter today.

#5 - Quality-Only Backup: Impact verbs, but sparingly.

Let's explore this with two examples:

EXAMPLE A — Product Manager (Prop-tech SaaS)

 Scenario: You shipped “1-Tap Rent Pay” for a property-management portal. No fancy analytics in place.

Finished bullet : “Rolled out 1-Tap Rent Pay to 18 k tenants, lifted on-time payments 35 %, cutting admin costs ≈ A$8 k a month.” 

EXAMPLE B — Software Engineer  (Sydney Fintech) 

Scenario: You optimised a serverless API by adding DynamoDB caching; no previous logs.

Finished bullet : “Optimised serverless caching—cut p95 latency 78 % (650 → 140 ms) for 2.4 M calls/mo, trimming AWS bill ≈ A$1.2 k and slashing alerts 4 → 1 per week.” 

Don’t worry if you can't hit all five moves.

Nail just one metric, time saved, % uplift, dollars cut, and you’re already ahead of 90 % of CVs I see.

Your The Careersy Dispatch – Tip of the Week

→ Ask yourself for your bullet point or performance review: “If I had to prove this impact tomorrow, what single number, time-span, or scale point could I pull from logs, reports, or memory to back it up?” 

It will provide instant clarity and credibility. 

TL;DR

Hard numbers aren’t optional in this market. 

Ask the Tip of the Week question, run Metric-Magic, and lock in impact before your review and CV. 

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Every Sunday I drop one bite-sized playbook—just like this—to help Aussie & Kiwi tech pros turn fuzzy effort into hard-hitting numbers (and bigger pay cheques).

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