What are Recruiters Looking for?
A study sponsored by TheLadders that used eye tracking technology, showed hot spots where recruiters focus their attention in the first six seconds. Here's a LinkedIn summary of that research.
Be careful what you take away from these results. The first six seconds are when the recruiter is deciding whether the candidate is even worth pursuing. It's an initial filtering process. One stack is ignored, the other is set aside for further consideration.
To get through this filtering process, you must have a clean, easy to read, first page. That page must give the critical information that will get your resume further attention. For the next stage of the process, your resume should still have sufficient detail to convince a recruiter that you are a good candidate.
There a couple of things that strike me regarding the hot spots. The summary statement matters. It's your way to convey your career in a paragraph. The first two jobs (or first job if you've been there a while) are very important. Finally, one of the resumes has education listed and it's very hot. If education is visible, it draws attention. If it isn't, will that hurt you? The example resumes are for people with a lot of experience. In my book, experience trumps education, but clearly it is a factor in filtering. I'd say it is probably highly dependent on the job you are applying for.
I would like to get my hands on the original work, but until then, what does the data say to you?
At the bottom of the article is a link from Buisiness Insider, about 11 Things You Should Never Put On Your Resume. As is usually the case, I don't entirely agree with the conventional wisdom, so it should make for provocative reading!
'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell talks a lot about stuff like this.
ReplyDeleteThere's a chapter about how subject matter experts can can
usually make accurate predictions about stuff they know about off of small slice of the whole picture.
I know when I review a resume I can usually figure out if if it's a match within a few seconds of looking at it. Of course I'll do my due diligence on it, but I've found my first impression usually doesn't change.
When the first things I read on a senior level resume are things like:
"Used the log4j to log the errors for the applications"
It usually doesn't get better....