There is a pattern in senior resumes and LinkedIn profiles that makes me more uncomfortable every year.

Someone “grew revenue by 38%.” Someone else “reduced costs by $4.2M.” Another “increased engineering productivity by 60%.”

Sometimes I know the work behind these lines well enough to know that the link between the person and the number was much weaker than the sentence suggests.

It is tempting to call this a problem of dishonest people. My view is that it is worse than that. I believe we built a market that rewards the performance and punishes the truth. In my experience, the candidate who writes “grew revenue by 38%” is more likely to get the interview than the one who honestly describes a shared effort. When the reward for exaggeration is high and the chance of being checked is low, I do not see exaggeration as a personal failure. I see it as the rational response to the system we built.

For years, candidates have heard the same advice: responsibilities are not enough. Show your impact. Show it with numbers.

The advice sounds reasonable. The problem, as I see it, is that most senior work does not produce clean numbers that belong to one person.

I have spent most of my career on both sides of this. I have led cloud transitions, integrated development centers after acquisitions, and built outsourced development, QA, and support operations. I have also led the managers and teams who do this kind of work. In all of it, I rarely saw a case where anyone, including the person doing the work, could honestly measure one leader’s contribution to a percentage point.

Not because the work had no impact. Because, in my experience, organizations do not work that way.

A cloud migration succeeds when engineering, product, infrastructure, support, finance, sales, and customers all move together. An acquisition integration works because many people make hundreds of decisions over months or years. An engineering organization improves because managers grow, teams change, tools change, priorities change, and sometimes the market changes too.

So when I read a senior resume, I do not ask whether the number is real. It usually is. I ask whose number it is.

The More Senior You Are, the Harder This Gets

I think this problem grows with seniority.

An individual contributor can often point to a direct result. They changed an algorithm, and latency dropped from 400 milliseconds to 120. They automated a deployment and cut it from three hours to fifteen minutes. The line from action to result is short and clear.

A Director, VP, or GM is supposed to work through other people. They set direction, hire, decide where to invest, stop bad projects, merge teams, and resolve conflicts. Their job is to create the conditions for other people to succeed.

If a senior leader can point to every good outcome and say “I did that,” I believe something is probably wrong.

Yet our hiring process asks them to do exactly that.

So We Invent Cause and Effect

What I have seen is that when every line needs a number, people adapt.

The business grew 30% while someone led part of it. The resume says: Grew the business by 30%.

A team shipped faster after a reorganization, better tools, new hires, and a quarter with fewer interruptions. The resume says: Improved engineering velocity by 45%.

A product launched when market demand was strong. The resume says: Drove $20M in new revenue.

The number may be real but the credit is fiction.

This is what I call attribution theater: a performance about who gets credit. We take a complex system with many causes and reduce it to one sentence where one person did one thing and one number moved.

It may look as it it was done in a careful and precise way so that the exact number will be associated to an exact person but it is not and often enough it is merely immpossible.

I have also seen profiles that go further. They change the facts: a title the person never held, or years at a client’s site described as years working for that client. That should be caught. In my experience, it often is not, because the same market that rewards inflated claims often does not check them closely. When fabrication pays and exaggeration is expected, the line between the two becomes hard to see, both for the people reading resumes and for the people writing them.

Numbers Still Matter

I am not arguing for a return to lists of responsibilities. “Managed engineering” and “Responsible for cloud” tell us almost nothing.

Numbers are useful. I just think we need to be more careful about which numbers we use.

Senior leaders can honestly describe scope. How many teams and people did you lead? How many products, sites, or countries? How many acquired organizations did you integrate? How large was the business you were responsible for? How long did the change take, and what was different after?

To me, that is still evidence. It measures scope and change, not personal credit.

Compare these two lines. “Grew revenue to $50M.” Against: “Led engineering for a product portfolio with about $50M in annual revenue.”

The first claims cause, the second gives context, personally I trust the second more.

There is also a third option: state the result without claiming you caused it alone. Here is a made-up example. “Led a cloud migration across 14 teams over 18 months. Support tickets for the product dropped 60% the following year.”

This tells me what changed and at what scale. In my view, the question of how much was you belongs in the interview.

How to Look Behind the Numbers

If you hire senior people, you are part of this system. I treat the resume as the start of the conversation, not as proof. Every number is an invitation to ask how it was produced. I have found that the answers separate people who changed a system from people who were nearby when it changed.

These are the questions I find most useful.

What would have happened if you were not there? Strong candidates describe what was going wrong, which decision would not have been made, or what would have taken much longer. Weak candidates repeat the number.

Which decisions were yours? Ask them to separate what they decided, what they received from the people before them, and what they delegated. People who truly led the work know where those lines are.

Who else could claim this number? Sales, product, finance, a previous leader. A candidate who names them and explains their role understands the system.

What did you try that did not work? Real change includes failed attempts. In my experience, a clean story with no mistakes was often written afterward.

How was it measured, and by whom? Starting point, time period, source. “Productivity up 40%” means little until you know what was counted, which is the same trap that makes most engineering dashboards measure motion instead of judgment.

None of these questions punish a candidate for having a number. They reward the candidate who can explain it. I believe that if enough hiring managers ask them, the incentive changes.

The Advice Is Incomplete, Not Wrong

I do not think “quantify your impact” is bad advice. I think it is incomplete.

Use numbers you can defend. Use revenue, cost, latency, conversion, retention, or adoption when the connection to your work is real.

When the work was organizational, strategic, or shared across many people, my advice is to measure the scope instead. How large. How complex. How much changed.

Scope numbers are still numbers. They show scale quickly, and they still make sense when someone asks hard questions in an interview.

What matters at senior levels, in my view, is not whether you can attach a number to every line. It is whether you can explain the system you changed, the decisions you made, and what happened because of them. That requires judgment taking and it is also much harder to fake.

We asked for metrics because we wanted impact instead of responsibility. That was the right instinct.

But we started rewarding the look of precision more than the truth behind it. And then we stopped checking.

We asked for metrics and instead of that we got attribution theater.