Eye Tracking: What parts of a CV do recruiters actually look at?

A new “study” note the inverted commas, reported by TIME Magazine is making headlines for the claim that recruiters spend an average of “six seconds” on each CV before they decide whether it is worth reading. The researchers suggest that 80% of this time is spent on titles and durations of past jobs and education rather than the actual content of the CV. According to TIME, the researchers give such inspiring tips as “don’t be creative”, “don’t focus on your personal achievements” and “have it professionally made”. That’s funny because that’s precisely the opposite of everything I’ve ever been told, and as TIME notes with no hint of irony:

“The standard thought was that recruiters spent at least several minutes on each CV.”

Before you rush out and start rewriting your CV, you should be aware that this “research” is not published in a journal but is self-published by a company that specialises in writing CV’s. Conveniently, they found that CV’s they’d written had a 60% higher level of “usability”. It’s worth noting that in their day-to-day work the company have been accused of operating a “scam” and being guilty of “fraud“, both over separate issues to this more than a little suspect research. For this reason I wouldn’t take this research the slightest bit seriously but I do think it would be interesting to see this research done properly.

NB: The “researchers” claim this type of study has never been done before. If anyone does know of any such research, give me a shout and I’ll post it here.

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