A recruiter will spend 6 seconds on your resume. If you’re lucky.

0 Comments/ in Career Advice / by Chris Wofford

April 24, 2012

From Flowing Data: During evaluations, eye tracking software was employed, and they found that the recruiters spent about six seconds on a resume looking for six main things: name, current company and title, previous company and title, previous position start and end dates, current position start and end dates, and education. After that, it was a crapshoot.

Beyond these six data points, recruiters did little more than scan for keywords to match the open position, which amounted to a very cursory “pattern matching” activity. Because decisions were based mostly on the six pieces of data listed above, an individual resume’s detail and explanatory copy became filler and had little to no impact on the initial decision making. In fact, the study’s eye tracking technology shows that recruiters spent about 6 seconds on their initial “fit/no fit” decision.

Tip: When submitting a resume, consider bullet-pointing those six key elements and drop in keywords where needed. Sort of like SEO for the job search.

[via the Dish]