Metric over verb

When recruiters scan a CV, the eye finds numbers before sentences. I have watched recruiters do it. They flick across a page in eight seconds and land on whatever is bolded, capitalised, or has a euro sign next to it.

The portfolio rule that follows: a project headline that is only a verb is invisible. A project headline with a number is the whole pitch.

I led the redesign of the onboarding flow. I scaled engagement across three categories. I drove alignment with engineering.

None of these mean anything without a number. Worse, they read identically across five hundred portfolios because every designer was handed the same word soup. Lead, drive, scale, ship, own. The eye reads past it.

If you cannot put a number on a project, you probably did not own enough of it to put on your portfolio. That is the uncomfortable corollary.

It is also a useful filter. Designers who can name the metric they moved have usually been close enough to the funnel to know what changed and what did not. Designers who cannot are often describing work that someone else owned.

There is a fashionable objection here, that vanity metrics inflate impact and serious designers should resist them. I disagree, mostly. A vanity number is still a number, and a number forces the conversation to be about the thing. Even a wrong number is a stake in the ground.

The honest version is to put the metric next to the action that moved it. Activation up from 43 to 500 monthly companies is a number. Activation up because we redesigned the wizard and killed bulk compensation, with the first-steps surface catching the rest, is a sentence a hiring manager can interrogate.

Every project line in my portfolio begins with the metric. The verbs come second. Context comes third, if at all.

It reads a little blunt. That is the point. Bluntness survives the eight-second scan. Nuance does not.