You spend hours slaving over your resume, crafting every word of every bullet point, and yet you’re getting no interest from the companies you send the resume to.  Maybe your problem is that you’re ignoring the most important part of your resume: The first half-page, or the first screenful.

Let’s do some simple math here.  Last time I posted job ads for programmers I was getting 300-400 responses per ad, so let’s say conservatively that a job posting nets a hiring manager 250 resumes. If he spends 10 minutes on each resume, examining each in detail, that comes out to:

250 resumes x 10 mins/resume  = 2500 minutes = 41.2 hours

That’s one entire work week doing absolutely nothing but reading those resumes 8 hours a day.  That’s not going to happen.

Much more realistic is for the reader to spend maybe a minute on each resume determining which ones are obviously crap, and which ones have potential and get put aside into a pile for closer consideration.

250 resumes x 1 min/resume  = 250 minutes = 4 hours

That’s much more manageable.  Now the hiring manager is able to set aside the 5-10% of the resumes that are not clearly garbage, or shotgunned to everyone, or from offshore consulting firms offering their services.

So you have at most a minute of actual reading time, max.  I’ve seen the claim of 10-20 seconds per resume commonly cited, too.

What does this mean to you, the resume writer?

Nobody is going to read past the first half-page of your resume unless you give them a reason to read the rest.

Think of the top half of your resume as a movie trailer, a teaser for what’s in the rest of the movie.  You want that top half-page to put all the best about you out front.   You’re going to start with a summary of what’s to follow, such as:

  • Six years experience system administration for 20-30 Linux and Windows servers.
  • Fully certified as both Red Hat Something Something and Windows Certified Blah Blah.
  • Extensive experience with backup strategies to physical media and offsite solutions.

In three lines, you’ve summarized who you are and given the reader reason to read the rest.  Yes, it is redundant to what’s in the rest of the resume, but that’s OK, because (and I know I’m repeating myself) nobody is going to read your entire resume unless they have a reason to.

The top half-page of your resume is so crucial it’s why an objective is absolutely the worst way to start a resume.  Consider a typical resume objective:

JOB TARGET: My goal is to become associated with a company where I can utilize my skills and gain further experience while enhancing the company’s productivity and reputation.

There is absolutely nothing in that to make the reader want to read further. Everything is about what the writer wants, not what she can bring to the company. That resume is bound for the reject folder.

You have less than half a minute to convince the reader to read your entire resume.  Make the first part of your resume tell all the important stuff, and only the important stuff.