What to write when you have no numbers to quantify

Why the invented number fails

The made-up figure is tempting because it is easy and because it looks like the examples. It fails for three reasons, and they compound.

It is unverifiable, and a reader knows it. "Improved team efficiency by 35%" raises the immediate question of how efficiency was defined, who measured it and against what baseline. If the honest answer is that nobody measured anything, the sentence has cost you credibility rather than bought it.

It is usually suspiciously round. Real measurements land on awkward numbers. Invented ones cluster on 20%, 30% and 50%, and a person who reads CVs all day has seen thousands of them.

And it is a question you will be asked. "Tell me how you measured that 35%" is a completely normal interview question, asked without suspicion, and there is no good answer if the number came from nowhere. You will be explaining a fabrication in the room where you most wanted to be trusted.

What counts as evidence besides a number

A number is one way of conveying size. It is not the only one, and often not the best. These are, and most people have several of them available:

• Scale — what you were responsible for. "A caseload of around forty" or "a ward of twenty-eight beds" tells a reader more than a percentage would.
• The before and after state. "Handover was a verbal conversation and a notebook; it is now a shared checklist the incoming shift signs off." No number, and the change is unmistakable.
• Difficulty — what made it hard. A migration completed with no downtime, an audit passed with no findings, a system replaced while it was still running.
• Consequence — what became possible afterwards, or what stopped happening. "The same error stopped recurring" is evidence.
• Ownership — whether you did it, led it, or contributed to it. Being honest here is not a weakness; a reader who suspects inflation discounts everything else on the page.
• Duration and repetition. Something sustained over two years is different from something done once, and the difference is worth stating.
• Recognition with a source. Being asked to train new starters, or to take over a difficult account, is evidence someone with information trusted you.

Rewriting a duty into evidence

The mechanical test is the one from our main writing guide: if a colleague in the same role could have written your bullet word for word, it describes the job rather than you. Fixing it rarely needs a figure.

Numbers you do have and probably overlooked

Before concluding that your work is unquantifiable, it is worth checking. The figures people miss are almost never percentages — they are counts, and they are usually sitting in plain sight.

• How many people, patients, students, clients, tickets or cases you handled in a typical week.
• How many you were responsible for supervising, mentoring or inducting.
• How long something took before, and how long it takes now, even approximately.
• How many sites, systems, languages, products or jurisdictions you covered.
• How often something recurred — nightly, monthly, per release, per intake.

When the number exists but is confidential

Revenue, headcount, client names, incident counts and contract values are frequently real, known to you, and not yours to publish. A CV is a document you hand to strangers, including strangers at competitors.

The usual solution is to describe the magnitude without the figure, and to be visibly deliberate about it. "A portfolio in the low tens of millions", "a mid-sized NHS trust", "one of the three largest retailers in the market" all convey scale while making clear that the omission is professional discretion rather than vagueness.

That reads well. Someone who understands what they are allowed to say about a previous employer is demonstrating something a hiring manager actively wants.

The line you should not cross

There is a real difference between presenting your work favourably and misrepresenting it, and it is not a fine one.

Choosing your strongest three achievements is selection, and every CV does it. Describing a team result in a way that makes your contribution clear is accuracy. Attaching a number nobody measured, taking sole credit for a group effort, or upgrading "contributed to" into "led" are not presentation choices. They are claims that can be checked, by a reference, by a former colleague who now works there, or by a question in the interview.

The practical standard: write nothing you would be uncomfortable explaining to the person who managed you at the time.