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Feature guide

What a Quality Score Actually Measures

A keyword checker can tell you that your resume and a job posting both contain the word "migration." It has no opinion about whether your migration sentence is any good. That's the whole difference between matching and grading. One measures overlap. The other measures strength, and, more usefully, names the weakness.

Achievd's grader reads the achievement itself and scores it on four dimensions, each from 0 to 10, each judged relative to your role. Scope asks how far the work reached: did it stay on your own desk, or did it touch the team, the department, the customer? Value asks how much the work mattered, measured by the yardstick your role is actually judged by, and money only counts where money is that yardstick. Ownership asks whether the work was yours: did you drive it, or were you in the room while it happened? Difficulty asks how hard it was for someone in that role, not how hard it sounds to an outsider.

Value carries the most weight, because "so what" is the first question every reader of your resume silently asks, and the last one they forgive you for not answering.

Here's what that looks like in practice. Take an achievement that grades out around a 4: "Led the migration of 1,200 users across 14 offices to a new authentication system." Scope scores high. Fourteen offices is real reach, well past one desk. Ownership is solid, since "led" is doing honest work. Difficulty lands mid-range. But value scores near the floor, because nothing in the sentence says what the migration bought anyone. Fewer lockouts? A passed security audit? Support hours back? The sentence doesn't know.

That breakdown is the useful part. A 4 on its own is just a bruise. A 4 that decomposes into high scope, decent ownership, low value is a diagnosis: the reach was real, and the evidence of value is missing. You don't need to rewrite the achievement. You need to add the measure. One dimension is thin, so the fix is roughly one clause wide.

A keyword matcher reading the same bullet would call it a hit on "migration" and "authentication" and be exactly as pleased before the fix as after it.

Scored against your own yardstick

The dimensions are relative to the role, and it's worth being plain about what that means. A teacher who turned around a failing classroom and an SRE who cut outage recovery time in half are not competing on one leaderboard. Each is graded against what their own role exists to do. For the teacher, value lives in student outcomes: attendance, reading levels, the kids who passed who weren't going to. For the SRE, it lives in reliability: minutes of downtime that didn't happen. Neither score borrows the other's yardstick, and a school nurse never loses points for failing to mention revenue.

So an 8 doesn't mean better than other people. It means strong for what this role is measured by. And a 3 doesn't mean your work didn't matter. It usually means the achievement, as written, isn't carrying the evidence that it did.

That's also why the number deserves more trust than a match percentage. A match percentage goes up when you paste in vocabulary, whether or not anything underneath improved. The score moves only when the achievement itself gets stronger, and until it does, the breakdown tells you which of four specific places it's weak. Low scope reads differently from low value, and both read differently from low ownership. Each points somewhere different, which is exactly what a single overlap number can never do.

This is the grader Achievd runs on the achievements in your vault. Click any score and the four dimensions behind it appear, so a low number never arrives alone; it comes with its reason attached.