Many resumes end up at the bottom of the pile, and with the results of a recent study highlighted by BusinessInsider, it's no wonder: recruiters only look at your resume for an average of six seconds before making a decision about you.
According to Will Evans, Head of User Experience at TheLadders, a mobile career network for professionals, the only research that had been done in this domain was self-reporting surveys, which simply was not good enough for us to understand what drives recruiters' decision-making. TheLadders utilized a scientific technique called "eye tracking" on 30 professional recruiters and examined their eye movements during a 10-week period to "record and analyze where and how long someone focuses when digesting a piece of information or completing a task."
"Recruiters are often inundated with job applications to popular listings, so it's no surprise that they don't spend a lot of time carefully reviewing each resume," says Amanda Augustine, a career expert at TheLadders. "However, none of us expected it to only take only six seconds."
The study's "gaze tracking" technology showed that recruiters spent almost 80% of their resume review time on the following data points: your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education.
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.
When you're updating your next resume, make this information easy to find. It seems the rest isn't all that important.
"You only get six seconds to make the right impression, so you have to make them count," Augustine says.
"Use a clean-looking layout that recruiters can easily scan and locate the information that matters most to them," she suggests. "Avoid dense blocks of text for the same reason, and save your bullet points to call attention to your most noteworthy and relevant accomplishments. List your experience in chronological order, starting with your current job."
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