I wrote an article for LinkedIn.
It tells you about the kind of records you should keep, and gives some suggestions for getting around confidentiality or unavailable data.
I will expand on the article here to talk about filmmaking specifically.
Quick Recap:
Metrics is the shorthand term for how you express your achievements with numbers on your resume. Their greatest value is that they are unique to you and outside of the ability of AI to extrapolate from the keywords in the job description or the description of your duties.
Metrics are often written as either actual figures or percentages over a time frame. They usually express some kind of improvement over time. Often they are dollar amounts or related to money, but sometimes they are numbers of people, such as subscribers or views when related to social engagement or customer numbers. Anything that can be measured can become a metric for your resume.
For financial metrics this could be about increases in revenues or decreases in costs, which both amount to more income for the company. Related to these are increases in efficiencies – that is to say time and productivity – which still affect money metrics.
Your metrics might also be related to goal attainment, such as meeting quotas within a time frame), including team accomplishments (eg “contributed to bringing in contracts worth $XXXK in Q2”). Goal attainment metrics are particularly useful for contract work when you are specifically hired to achieve a particular project.
Every time you use a verb related to change, you have an opportunity to include a metric – in fact it is almost essential that you do if you want your resume to sparkle. Change verbs include “improve”, “reduce”, “implement”, “fulfil”, or “expand”.
Filmmaking and Metrics
Any time you speak about financials, it is important to include those metrics. This can come up often in resumes for producers or production managers. If your skills include fundraising, it is nice to be able say something about the budgets that you typically work with, or how much you have raised for different types of project, especially as a percentage of the total budget.
Producers have a bird’s-eye view. You can speak confidently about total budgets and about returns. If you don’t have box office numbers, you can still find information about festival attendance (and any prizes). I’m told it’s not easy to get accurate viewership information from streamers, but you will find reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, and the YouTube/social media numbers for your trailers. All these become metrics for your resume – and if you are a producer, your bio.
Every department has a budget – so every department head should be able to say what kind of budgets they work with (dollar range) AND express the number of crew members who report to them on any particular project. This also applies to the seconds-in-charge.
I’m a Production Designer so I can talk about the overall art department budgets and staffing. Often it is helpful to know the total production budget of the film. However, the set decorator can speak of their portion of the budget and crew. Then the Lead Man can speak of their portion, maybe as a daily amount, and how many people are on the swing gang.
What if you are not in charge of a budget?
If you are production crew, see if you use the call sheets or daily production reports for just a few metrics. You can state the number of people on the teams – “in teams of between 4 – 10 grips and up to 15 rigging grips”. You can talk about the number of set ups achieved per day, how many total yards (or miles) of dolly track you helped lay over an entire shoot, or how many hours of shooting with a vehicle set up or a portable green screen set up.
In the production office, you might keep track of how much equipment worth $XXXK was shipped to a distant location. A locations scout might discuss how many locations they visited for research, how many miles they drove over the time, or the range of rental fees. If you were able to negotiate a better rate, tell that story.
I think I’m going to rewrite my PD resume to include some more numbers in my summary, like the total number of features I’ve designed, then how many I decorated. This is helpful for the ATS compliant resume where the credits are either later or more compressed.
Actual numbers vs Percentages
Choose the expression that gives clarity and sounds the most impressive. Sometimes this means doing some math.
You can calculate how much improvement you have gained by using the starting number as 100%.
For example: (using simple whole numbers)
Last year’s ticket sales for the short film festival were $20,000. After your work to build the audience this year’s ticket sales (at the same price) were $25,000, or $5000 increase (the difference). As a percentage:
5K = x% x 20K (the first amount)
5/20 = 0.25 thus a 25% increase.
A 25% increase in ticket sales in 12 months (or however long you worked in that position since the last festival) is a pretty impressive metric.
Here’s another example:
Suppose your task was to reduce costs in the production office and you implemented a new team project management software package that was more efficient, so there was less paper use and less waste to be disposed of as well. It might be that the software is a higher initial cost, but the time saved, lower purchasing and waste disposal costs would be immediately visible.
You can look at man hours in the same way as the ticket sales numbers, and calculate a percentage saving, and then include actual dollar figures as an estimate range for how much less stationary and shredding was being paid for. You might be able to extrapolate how long it would be before the software cost paid for itself and include that estimate.
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