Having worked with recruiters for the last 12+ years the following article on Linkedin definitely caught my eye: “What Recruiters Look at during the 6 Seconds They Spend on your Resume”.
Yep! 6 seconds, and it is so true. Recruiters have trained their eyes to look for key data: Education, Companies worked for, Current Position, and Previous Position. Are you a professional contractor or a permanent employee.
This 6 second scan is what gets you to the next step; a phone, or face to face interview where they go over your resume in detail.
If the resume is cluttered with boxes, pictures, graphs and the recruiter can’t find the pertinent information then your resume is put back in the resume pool for possible processing at a later date.
In the last 12+ years we have reformatted over 40,000 resumes. This includes:
- Using a clean, concise format.
- Having a short profile to outline your strengths in relation to the job you are applying for.
- ACTION WORDS – All points should use strong action words that describe your duties in very concise terms. Here is just one of 100’s of webpages on the internet that list action words. http://www.ceswoodstock.org/job_search/resumeaction.shtml
- Never, never, never use the word “I”
- And below is the layout we use, look how easy it is to find the key information.
So 6 seconds to catch someone’s eye. Don’t waste it
RESUME SAMPLE
