I was talking with a group of Quality Engineers recently when someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer.
“How do you quantify your experience if you don’t have percentages?”
My immediate reaction was, “How do you not have percentages?”
They said, “I don’t have access to those numbers. I know I improved things, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to put on my resume.”
Hmm. Interesting. As a recruiter, I’ve always encouraged candidates to quantify their accomplishments because hiring managers want to see measurable impact. But now I’m wondering if not every engineer has access to executive dashboards or business KPIs, and are sometimes unable to tie every improvement to a neat percentage? Is that why?
So the next time I sat down with a Quality Engineering Manager, I asked him exactly that.
“If a candidate tells you they don’t know how to quantify their work, what would you tell them?”
He said to stop thinking in vague business terms and start thinking like a QE manager.
Every QA organization already measures success. Instead of trying to invent percentages, think about the metrics your team actually worked with.
Did your work reduce the QA effort required to deliver a story? That’s a form of measurable impact. For example, a feature that once required a day and a half of manual testing might now only take half a day after automating regression tests and standardizing test data. Or a regression suite that once took eight hours to execute can now be completed in two. Whether you measure it in story points, hours, or test cycles, the takeaway is the same: your work enabled the team to deliver the same level of quality with less effort.
The same thinking applies to other areas of QA. Did you improve test coverage? Reduce bug leakage into production? Lower defect density? Shorten regression testing or release turnaround time? Increase automation coverage? Move test automation into the same sprint instead of building it after the story was already delivered?
Those are all measurable outcomes that hiring managers understand because they’re the same metrics they use to evaluate their own teams.
He was also specific about why vague language doesn’t work.
Words like improved, better, or a lot are not only common language across all resumes but is also subjective. Saying you “improved testing” means something different to every hiring manager. But saying you reduced QA effort, increased test coverage, lowered bug leakage, or improved testing capacity gives someone concrete evidence of your impact.
You don’t need to invent numbers.
You need to think about how your work changed the way your team delivered quality.