Laid off six weeks ago. Senior marketing manager, seven years in B2B SaaS. And I'm staring at my resume trying to write bullets for roles where literally nothing was easily quantifiable.
Like. I ran brand partnerships. I led content strategy. I managed an agency relationship. These are coordination-heavy, influence-heavy jobs where impact is real but the number is... made up if I put it there.
Every piece of advice says "quantify your impact." But if I write "drove 30% brand awareness lift" I would be inventing that number. I don't have attribution data for brand. Nobody does, really.
Here's what I've landed on after talking to a few people and getting feedback from a recruiter friend:
Scale bullets when you can't measure outcome. Instead of "launched a campaign," write "launched a campaign across 6 partner channels, 4 paid and 2 organic, reaching an estimated 200k accounts." The 200k is from a channel report, not a vanity metric I fabricated. It's scope, not impact.
Process bullets when you have no scale. "Built the agency briefing process from scratch, reducing revision cycles from 4 rounds to 2 on average." I actually tracked this in a Notion doc. That 4-to-2 is real.
Time as a metric. "Delivered 12 quarterly business reviews on time for 3 consecutive years." Reliability and consistency are genuine metrics for coordination work.
Influence as a metric. "Shaped messaging adopted by sales, CS, and exec decks company-wide." Softer but real.
Still think my bullets are weaker than an engineer who can say "reduced p99 latency by 40%." But I've stopped trying to fake numbers I don't have. Hiring managers in my function know what brand work looks like. The ones that dock me for not having hard metrics aren't the right fit anyway.
Anyone else in brand, comms, or content doing something different? Curious what's actually working in 2026.