This piece is written to direct your attention towards the importance of numbers in life. Let’s perform a little exercise, close your eyes for 5 minutes, to visualize 1 asset you would like to possess in the near future.
Perhaps, your imagination travels towards a recently launched car; cherishing the design, comfort, and power of the vehicle. You start assessing its speed limit, mileage, fuel efficiency, capacity, price, and EMIs.
In the very next moment, numbers begin to conjure up in your mind. In this example, the car can be replaced with a house, diamonds, electronic gadgets, and the list goes on. In each case, this pattern will reoccur. You start from feeling the joy of possession, and then numbers take over to dominate and supplement your imagination.
Right from our birth, numbers become an inseparable part of our life. Our date of birth is the basis to evaluate our future through astronomy. The number of months it took us to speak or walk serve as benchmarks to evaluate our physical strength. In academics, grades, percentiles, and marks form foundation of our professional life.
From very early years of our life, we get to learn the importance of numbers. Success and performance is evaluated in numbers.
While human life is captured in numbers, interestingly however, we forget its power while writing our professional resume. A resume is the backbone of our professional life; it is the most powerful tool to market our achievements for getting better professional prospects. Often we come across resumes reflecting job functions, responsibilities, and achievements in many words but very less numerals.
Let’s evaluate the merit of digitizing resume points through examples
A) Research and value new equity opportunities for the fund and provide a pitch to the sector team and fund manager
B) Researched new equity investment opportunities for $200,000 fund, to create sales presentation for fund manager
Both the above listed statements are stating the same thing, but the 2nd statement knocks the head with factual and accurate information. It does not leave the prospective employer with fill in the blanks to wonder about the size of the fund.
Following are 2 merits of numbers; making it a rock star in the world of resumes:
1) Numbers represent specific facts such as percentage, market size, revenue, turnover, profit, and loss. Your employer is looking for numbers desperately. Try to convert your achievements and efforts into numbers. It is going to break the ice immediately, saving all guess work.
2) Employers’ attention span on any resume is between 30 seconds to 1 minute. As a matter of fact, they browse through the resume to look for spikes or something catchy. It is really not easy to skim through numerals without getting engaged with the content. In fact, from visual aspect, shape of the digit is different from letters. Numerals stand different in pool of words and not easy to go unnoticed.
So the next time, when you catch up with your resume just remember, “Numbers make your resume roar, and they are very difficult to ignore”.
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