If you haven’t taken the challenge yet, make sure to click the link above and come back when you’re finished.
Scroll down to find out who scored better: the Average Joes or the Professional Recruiters.
SEE ALSO > The 6-Second Resume Challenge Answers: Keep or Trash?
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Recruiters Can’t actually Judge a Resume in 6 Seconds – and what that means for you
The Myth
Resume Genius has BUSTED a popular myth claiming that recruiters can judge resumes in 6 seconds.
How did we bust it? With an experiment. We pitted average joes against professional recruiters to find out which group can better judge a resume within 6 seconds. The results were amusing.
The Experiment
We presented average joes and professional recruiters with a task: sort through 10 resumes, keeping good candidates and trashing bad ones.
The challenge? They only had 6 seconds to judge each resume. We spread the word across the web, and the data started pouring in.
The Results
9,000 Participants – Overall Score: 5.5/10
7,000 Average Joes – Score: 5.7/10 WINNER!
2,000 Recruiters – Score: 5.2/10 LOSER 🙁
You are seeing that correctly. Average joes scored higher than professional recruiters. Not that it matters. If this were a pop quiz in high school, everyone would be earning an F — so no one earns bragging rights.
What went so wrong for everyone?
The Analysis
The answer is obvious: there is too much content on a resume to be judged accurately in 6 seconds. Therefore, people had to rely on resume formatting and aesthetics to make a judgement. If you’re a professional recruiter, you know that’s only a small part of judging a resume. But it obviously has a huge impact.
In fact, here’s how big that impact is. We found that if a resume is well-formatted, we found that a resume had a 25% higher chance of being kept within the first 6 seconds – even if the person was an obviously bad candidate. We found people keeping resumes that featured:
- A massively overqualified candidates
- Ridiculous amounts of spelling errors
- Missing Contact Details
So if there are HRs actually judging resumes within 6 seconds, they probably won’t be HRs much longer.
Fortunately, only 21% of people said that 6 seconds is enough time to judge a resume. For some exceptionally fast readers or highly experienced HRs, this may be true…
The Conclusion
But you can’t deny the facts. On average, everyone scores a 5/10. An F. So let’s put this myth to bed — recruiters can’t judge resumes in 6 seconds, and nor should they try to.
But there is still one major lesson to be learned from our challenge — making a good first impression on the recruiter improves your resume’s chances by 25% in the first 6 seconds.
Next Step – How to Make a Strong First Impression:
- Use an easy-to-read font
- Maintain a balance white space-to-text ratio
- Apply proportional margins – 1 inch is standard
- Use lines to break up the text
- Make sure all your bullet points are evenly aligned
- Add a bit of color
Itzul_ElAndaSolo
Nice article and very useful insights
Resume Genius
Glad you liked it! Feel free to spread the word.
-The RG Team
Amruta Mahamuni
Great blog. thanks for sharing these points.
Rachel Stones
I loved this challenge, it does prove that 6 seconds isn’t nearly enough time. I could see 30 seconds being enough for those in the industry looking at resumes on a daily basis but 6 seconds is obviously out of the question. I took it and scored a 6/10 but I’ll be the first to admit several of those times I had no idea whether to keep or trash it. Thanks for the fun assessment!
bob parker
The test was slow to load and play because it had lots of extra drek that almost crashed a current version of Chrome browser. Good experience and concept (so please improve the execution as it is valuable). I think it helps understand that the best approach is a multiple sort process, which is what I have used in my hiring. 1st pass is to drop 50-75%, then spend more time on next pass, then more time on each pass. So a ‘no phone number’ may be legitimate to not see until 2nd pass. But when I got 75 resumes for a lawyer position (requiring a JD and bar card) offering only $15 per hour (in essence an internship), we needed a way to get the list of candidates smaller quickly to give due diligence to those that made sense.
Resume Genius
Hi Bob,
Thanks for your input, we try to keep the site optimized for our users to have the best experience possible, so your comment will be taken into account. Your method also seems fair — recruitment and hiring are significant parts of having a successful business, and deserve greater attention from companies.
-The RG Team
Robyn Rated
Great challenge! I enjoyed it… and experienced no lag in test load time at all. I thought this was a great tool to bring attention to ‘this process’ by using an actual timer. I scored 8/10, but firmly believe 30 to 60 seconds are necessary to adequately determine an initial ‘keep or dump’ resume. And, to effectively evaluate candidates to interview (from the ‘keep’ pile), I take a couple minutes to actually read the entire resume. These are just my opinions, of course. Thanks again!