There’s a great lesson about resumes in The Office, during that episode where Darryl is trying to get the regional manager’s job. On his resume, he says:
“Coordinated and implemented receipt, storage, and delivery of over 2.5 billion units of inventory”.
2.5 billion? 2.5 billion units of what? This isn’t far from how many people’s resumes look, loaded with arbitrary numbers that would be impossible to validate, or are simply irrelevant to the job being applied for.
Including data can be powerful to demonstrate the impact you had in your resume, but only if the numbers are relevant to the circumstances, and if not verifiable, at least believable. Leave out any data loaded with internal jargon or requiring deep context not provided in the resume. And especially skip the meaningless, vanity metrics. Just because a number is large doesn’t make it impressive.