Four Seconds That Can Change Your Life

Four seconds...not a lot of time, is it?

Think of all the important decisions you can make in four seconds. If you like to read books, chances are that you can decide in that amount of time whether the cover is interesting enough that you would like to open the book and examine it more closely. It may be true that you can't tell a book from its cover, but the cover can make all the difference in whether you decide to open it and examine it further.

Resumes are no different. The first four seconds represents how much time recruiters and/or hiring managers spend deciding whether to look at most resumes. It doesn't sound like a lot of time, and it isn't actually, but that's the average amount of time that you have to get someone's attention with a piece of paper.

When I first heard that number I was skeptical, but then I noticed that as a recruiter that's about how much time I would spend on a resume to see if I wanted to pay attention to it. Anyone who does the same thing over and over develops a routine that works best for them in that task. People who look at resumes are looking for specific information that pertains to the position they need to fill in their organization, and if the resume looks too "busy"...too much "stuff" hiding what they want to find, they skip it. A practiced eye needs about four seconds to determine whether a resume is worth reading.

Why is this four second rule so common? One reason, and it's not your fault, but it is your problem. That is, most jobs have an incredibly high number of unqualified people who apply for them, and it takes just as much time to read a bad resume as a good one, so those who "read" them develop a routine way of perusing and analyzing resumes that allows them to separate the contenders from the pretenders. After the separation, they go back and spend more time on the "contender" pile. If your resume is not in that pile, you're not even considered for the position.


What's the lesson here? Very simple...get your resume into a format that will catch the eye of the reader and that will put you in the right pile or the right electronic folder. Otherwise, your four seconds is the closest you'll get to that job.