A recent study by The Ladders.com tracked recruiters’ eyes as the scanned resumes over a period of ten weeks. The study was able to track their eye movements over resumes and produce heat maps of where their eyes spent the most time. The resulting maps looked like this (the darker spots indicate where their eyes rested longest.) The entire read time averaged six seconds. Six seconds for your 15-year career. That makes it even more imperative that you figure out how to get the recruiter to spend the six seconds on your most important writing.
The resume on the right was edited to place the most important information where the recruiter would read it.
As you can see, large blocks of text were not even scanned. Mostly, the recruiters spent time on the left side of the page and viewed bold type headlines. The good news is, we’ve been advocating for this approach to resume writing for a while. Write strong and bold headlines that draw the recruiter’s eyes through the document to your most important skills and experience. Keep your paragraphs short, and use bullet points for easy reading. Write to the hot spots.
See the entire Fast Company story here.
