Submitted by jcm13 on
in
Forums
I have am having difficulty knowing where the limit is in writing down accomplishments. I work for a privately owned company and I have had a direct positive effect on top line revenue number as well as profit. The problem is, how do you write it down:
-Grew revenue by 15% year over year in of a $45M/yr company through leading sales strategy and new product development.
Regardless of whether this is a good or bad accomplishment, it may violate the privacy of the company as it exposes revenue numbers which are not publicly released. The alternative of leaving out the revenue that the 15% is based on makes the accomplishment meaningless because 15% of $45M is a much larger number than 15% of $100k. Likewise putting in the raw increase $$ without the revenue is also meaningless because for a $10B/year company that would represent mediocre performance.
What is the right way to ethically handle this?
My $0.02
I can think of one alternative... If you include a description of the company earlier in the resume you could include revenues there. Something like...
"Industry leader in axiomatic design tools with annual revenues of approximately $50m."
Then you could show the accomplishment as a percentage. Consider combining annual revenue increases into one figure instead of 'year over year.' If you were with the company 5 years and increased revenues 15% each year, it sounds better to say you increased revenues 75%.
--Michael
Use percentages
The recruiter will know it's a small company. Use percentages on your resume, and you can share the number in the interview. Private companies are very wary of letting such numbers out, and you're unlikely to lose an interview because you didn't indicate the baseline number.
John Hack
Both ideas are great
Both ideas are great advice. I think I will have to leave the overall revenue figures off and use the percentages even though it makes it harder for the recruiter to get at the magnitude of the job. Thank you both.