The Ten-Second Résumé

By Jim Davis

Guess how long it takes for employers to look over most resumes. If you read the title of this article you already know the answer. But you may not believe it.

Well, it's true. Most resumes get only 10 to 30 seconds of attention by the person who is reviewing them. And the people who submitted those resumes are out of luck. They don't even get considered for the jobs they were applying for.

This may seem unfair, but there's a good reason why those resumes got discarded so quickly. They had some kind of error in them. It may have been a spelling error. Or, maybe it was a grammatical error. Or it could have just been messy. Whatever the error was, though, it told the person reviewing the resume that the person who wrote it didn't care enough to make sure it was correct.

Your resume is your introduction to the person you hope will hire you. It's in your best interest to spend the time to be sure it doesn't get thrown out before they even have a chance to see what you have to offer.

Be careful when you are writing it. Get someone else who knows how to spot obvious errors to read it and point out any errors you may have made. Then make the changes and check it again. It's worth the effort.

UPDATE:
I just got an important comment (It's shown here) that you will want to know about.
Jim,You just donated 3 more seconds to my average time of "7 seconds" that average recruiters spent on perusing each resume.Among my instruction materials, I further advise job seeker to focus on the top 3 inches of space where "Summary of qualifications" should be written. If a resume passes the "3 inches" and "7 seconds" tests, candidate may get a call for telephone interview. Bernice Kao, Career Coach, Fresno County Library. www.fresnolibrary.org/jcs

Thanks, Bernice