Do we really only spend 6 seconds scanning your resume?
By Liza | Categories: Accounting Jobs Sydney, Career advice, Recruitment | No Comments
If you’ve hooked in to Linkedin this week you would have seen this provocative piece pop up as a headline article.
Here’s what recruiters look at in the six seconds they look at your resume.
It shows a study of a scientific technique called “eye tracking.” Researchers from the website the Ladders tracked the eye movements of 30 professional recruiters 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.”
It shows that we focus on your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education.
So is this all true?
Well, partly.
We’d like to discuss a few things around the way we review resumes.
Along with your experience we are just as interested in the impact that you have made in each of these roles, and how that relates to the role we are recruiting.
One thing that bugs us is that people consistently confuse their responsibilities with their achievements. Your responsibilities are the tasks you complete. Your achievements relate to the impact you have had when you complete those tasks, or when you have gone above and beyond your job description.
No matter how good your experience is, if you have a sloppy resume with funny fonts, strange spacing and limited or inappropriate detail, we may well question your communication skills and your grasp of technology. These are fundamental skills all employers need.
Do keep in mind that we are time poor.
If we are faced with a pile of hundreds of resumes we are going to give your resume the quick once over. So all the relevant information must be easy to read and catch our eye. Keep your heading simple and bold and space out your information so it’s easy for us to read.
We strongly suggest that you take your resume writing seriously. The Ladders study showed that clear layout that made it easier for a yes/no decision. You don’t want to be the person who is a yes for that role, but a no because we cannot find the pertinent points on your resume.
If you are confused in any way at all about the job advertisement, or if you want us to spend time reviewing your application, call us. That’s why we put our number on the advertisement.
(02) 8221 0553.
