What Do Recruiters Tend To Overlook?

Tying Your Shoes and Writing Your Resume

You’ve got six seconds to grab their eye. Six seconds is the average time a recruiter will scan a resume. You’re entire professional career and chances at this position are wrapped up in that minuscule amount of time, so you better make an impression.

Recently, The Ladders conducted a study on how recruiters scan resumes. Their eye movement, eye targets and timing were all studied over a 10-week period. This study was meant to identify what recruiters zero in on and what they tend to overlook. One of the other main goals of this research was to establish if there was a difference in how recruiters scanned and absorbed the information from a professionally written resume than from a resume written by the candidates themselves.

Writing and updating a resume seems pretty common sense; we’ve been doing it all of our lives. This study brings to light some of the not so common sense aspects of resume writing. In an unsurprising turn out, the professionally written resumes were rated as showing a 60 percent improvement rate over those that were written by candidates.

Of the six seconds that recruiters spend on scanning each resume, the majority (80%) of that time is spent looking at these basics:

• Name

• Title and Company Name (Current and Previous)

• Start and End Dates (Current and Previous)

• Education

What the Professionals Do:How to get the most out of your six seconds of fame. Read more…

photo credit: Cali4beach via photopin cc

Maren Hogan

Maren Hogan is CEO of Red Branch and general Bad@$$

Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer and community builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. Maren started Red Branch Media and, before she hired all the smiling faces you see below, she ran it on her own. In marketing for over 15 years, she has deep experience in strategic campaigns and a long-term, results-based operational approach.