What Recruiters Actually Look at in the First 7 Seconds of Your Resume

As a recruiter, to tell you the truth, most recruiter look at your resume for about 7 seconds. You can gripe about why only so much time or you can utilize this to your advantage.

Let's start with why? Why do recruiters only look at your resume for 7 seconds? The short answer is that they are trained to discern the qualifications from your resume to the job description. Recruiters receive hundreds of applications for each role they're hiring for and typically they're working on multiple roles at the same time. Hence, they look for whether the resume meets the basic qualifications or not.

You can say that it's not fair, however this is the reality of the world that we live in.

What do they look for? The scan is an initial assessment, do you have the right job titles, basic keywords and skills, and the number of years of experience they're looking for. Through the initial assessment the recruiters creates a "revisit again" pile. This pile is the one that they go in depth to identify whether the applicant (YOU) are actually qualified.

What can you do about this? You can create a resume that's attractive to the recruiter during the initial and in-depth scan. If you are applying to an Operations Manager role, you need to ensure that the word "Operations Manager" appears in the first half of the first page of your resume. Your most recent job title needs to have this term. You need to look at the keywords in the job description and ensure that it matches the keywords in the first two jobs on your resume (IF you have done the job). Do not outright lie. Most recruiters aren't looking past your first two roles unless they don't see what they're looking for but think that you could be a potential match. Though honestly in this economy most recruiters aren't going past the first two resumes.

You can also use our free tool; Resume Align to identify key gaps in your resume!

If you'd like to have your resume professionally rewritten, contact us today!