3 Ways To Get Your Resume Noticed in 6 Seconds
Were you aware that it takes 6 seconds for the average recruiter to decide if your resume/CV deserves further investigation or whether it should be cast in to the rejection bin?
This is very much the case according to a recent article I wrote about the TheLadder’s survey of 30 professional recruiters. In this survey TheLadder’s researchers monitored the eye movement of 30 recruiters over a 10 week period using ‘eye tracking’ technology.They analyzed what areas of a resume/CV a recruiter looks at when assessing it for an initial ‘fit/no fit decision’.
Their findings were both enlightening and striking as they found that recruiters spend an average of 6 seconds deciding if a resume/CV is a ‘fit/no fit’, and they spent 80% of their time looking at 6 bits of information, and these were: 1. Name, 2. Current title/company, 3. Previous title/company, 4. Previous position start and end dates, 5. Current position start and end dates, 6. Education
In this article I wanted to explain how you can optimize your resume/CV
1. Prepare a tabulated data summary at the top of the resume/CV which summarizes key data, for example:
Now, you might want to adjust the formatting and spatial layout and use of borders etc… to suit your own resume/CV style and layout but I hope you can see what I mean more clearly by showing the diagram.
2. What do we mean by an organized layout, strong information hierarchy and use of bold headings and formatting to help recruiters easily navigate your resume/CV?
Take a look at the example below to see what we mean by this. You can see that is easy to pick out the company, job title and role and if the recruiter decides to go for a deeper scan they can quickly see what you have done as the job is structured into responsibilities and achievements.
3. Of course the study also highlighted the importance of education so although we have summarized this in tip 1 above, make sure to include an education section at the end of year resume/CV, which is clearly signposted and well structured like in tip 2.
As a final word, when designing your resume/CV to be optimized for a recruiters 6 second scan try and adopt a minimalist approach when it comes to format, font, and content. Use bullet points as much as possible as they are easier to read.
You can Download a recruiter optimized CV or Resume here.
