Sending out your resume? Be prepared to share it with a VERY busy recruiter.
TheLadders used eye-tracking software to study how 30,000 recruiters looked at resumes. They discovered that recruiters spend only 7.4 seconds on a resume before making a decision.
Here are a few simple hacks to make your resume easy to read in 7.4 seconds:
- Keep it to 1.5 pages in length. Summarize whole jobs into 1 single line, if necessary.
- More white space is better. TheLadders found that “cluttered” resumes packed with information performed the worst, while more white space did better.
- Use an easy-to-read font. Sans serif fonts (like Calibri, Tahoma, Arial) work really well for resumes.
- Don’t make the font too small. Instead of squeezing in more content with a small font, stick with an 11-pt. or 12-pt. font for bullets and body text.
- Use bullets. 3-5 bullets under a job title work better than a long paragraph.
- Bold the job titles. “Recruiters scan for job titles and subheads,” according to their 2018 study.
- Use numbers. Numbers, percentages, dollars, and statistics about your performance (for example, “Serviced 53 customers/day” or “Sold $100,000 of equipment in 1 year”) grab the recruiter’s attention, and tell a story about your achievements.
- Don’t use pictures. TheLadders discovered that recruiters literally cannot stop staring at a picture—and will waste 20% of your precious 7.4 seconds looking at it.
- Shorten words and phrases. Use shorthand like “incl.,” “can’t,” “implemented/executed.”
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