TIPS & MYTHS
(*Or 8 seconds, or whatever number the writer happens to have found and copied.)
You hear this one a lot, mainly from low-end and mediocre résumé services, but also from many “experts” who just repeat what they’ve seen elsewhere. However, if you think a bit about how the early stages of the selection process must work, you’ll probably start to smell the BS, and realize that it can’t be that simple.
SUMMARY:
In fact, there are only two kinds of résumés that don’t make the first cut:
1. The ones from people who are very obviously unqualified.
2. The résumés that have been so “creatively” formatted that they either don’t make it through the normal electronic processing at all, or come through so messed up that no one will bother to read them.
In almost every hiring situation, a surprisingly large proportion of the résumés received will fall into one of those two categories.
Those résumés are very easy to spot. It doesn’t take even fifteen seconds. That’s why a very fast initial sorting is a normal part of the screening process. It’s just clearing out the garbage before the real screening begins.
Any conventionally formatted résumé from a qualified applicant will pass that first 15-second screening. It’s no big deal.
The real job for your résumé is passing the rest of the screening process, and showing that you are more promising than the rest of the applicants.
If you’re applying for a more senior position, and especially for upper management and executives, the screening process will involve a number of people—not only HR people, but the people who will be working with and managing the new hire. This means that a number of highly able people who have a lot at stake will be reading the résumé even after the first interview. They will read it very carefully. Your résumé will be read and re-read right up until the final choice is made.
It’s not easy to write a résumé that will get even a well-qualified applicant through the later stages of the hiring process. That’s why most résumé services prefer to talk about getting through the early stages: the automated résumé processing, and that much-touted first cut.