Recruiter: treat your resume like a movie trailer

Six seconds: That’s all the time a job recruiter is going to spend with your resume.

So, how do you make every second count? A study by BusinessInsider.com tracked exactly what the recruiter’s eyes focused on while sifting through hundreds of applicants.

Carly Hazen, the executive director of recruitment at professional placement firm Prince, Perelson and Associates said their job recruiters are trained to quickly analyze resumes. “Recruiters spend six to 10 seconds on making an initial ‘fit or no fit decision.'”

In the study, the eye movements of recruiters as they read through resumes were tracked during the 10-week research period. Researchers found that given how much time recruiters spend with each resume, they would focus in on each applicant’s name, title, current position and its start and end dates, previous company, previous position and its start and end dates, as well as education.

According to Hazen, a lot of applicants are weeding themselves out by using meaningless, cliched phrases.

“You don’t need to see a lot of filler words like clear communicator or detail oriented.” Those have completely lost their meaning and in this day and age, they have gotten completely overused,” said Hazen.

After working in an industry for years, a tendency to use too much insider lingo in the job description section is common.

That’s why Hazen said to keep it simple.

“Think how you can make that transition into a wider audience. Play around with different titles that are more relevant and try to (describe your work) with broader mass appeal,” she said.

Don’t give away too much, just try to hook the employer into wanting to learn more. Hazen said to think of your resume as your own personal movie trailer.

“You want to highlight the different areas that are going to be widely appealing. You don’t have to go into too much detail. The goal is almost to hook the interest. If you already start telling them too much information, they start saying, ‘Well, this person is overqualified; they don’t actually have our industry experience,'” Hazen said. “Tell them just enough.”

As for what your resume should look like, before you get too creative with the design, ask yourself if it is relevant to the job, like if you’re in marketing, advertising, graphic design, or another type of content driven industry.

“I don’t think it hurts if you’ve got a more standardized resume and you can put on their a portfolio or website information if you want them to be redirected to get a little bit more color on your background,” said Hazen. “But in terms of the vast majority of industries that don’t have anything to do with advertising or marketing, I definitely feel like you want to leave creative monograms off, you want to leave your pictures off.”

Save your extra creativity for the interview, Hazen said.

MyNorthwest.com’s Alyssa Kleven contributed to this report.