Most people read in 2 1/2 inch chunks. That is why drudgereport.com and newspapers use narrow columns.
Do you have a 3 ½ inch reading span?
Or is yours 2 ½ inches long?
To get your accomplishments and victories noticed, you have to learn the art of placement. You need to put power words and numbers in the first 2 ½ or 3 ½ inches of each paragraph and bullet. If you don’t, that bullet and that paragraph will not be read.
More than 80% of resumes are tossed in the trash after a 10 second review. More than half of the rest are tossed out after a second review of 45 seconds. The reason is that 100 resumes may come in for a particular job. Reviewing each resume for one minute would take over 1 ½ hours. Instead a screener takes 15 minutes to reduce that pile to 10 or 20 resumes by trying to quickly reject the obviously unfit ones. Since the boss doesn’t want to read even that many resumes, a 45 second review of the remaining resumes will reduce the pile to at most 5 resumes. Then the boss takes those 5 resumes AND DOES THE SAME THING!!!! He shuffles through the pile doing first a ten second review and then a 45 second review, hoping he only has to read one or maybe two in depth.
Can you survive that process?
What gets your resume past all the reviews is having boss stopping information where it gets read. That means you have to have your greatest accomplishments in bullets. Your finest deeds must be at the top of the list of bullets. It also means you put your list of duties, if you really really feel you need to have them, in a single paragraph so they are easy to ignore until the boss decides he will slog through the whole resume.
At the bottom of www.agicc.com/resumeideas.htm are links to some very good resumes. They are actual resumes we got permission to put on our site. They are resumes that got people jobs fast.
Your job review needs to go through the same editing process. Let’s face it, your boss finds your job review even more boring than you do. His boss will barely glance at it. You have to learn to put critical information in the first 2 ½ inches of bullets. It will earn you a lot of money.
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Something To Do Today
Rewrite your list of accomplishments. Make it into bullets. Put the boss stopping words and numbers in the first 2 ½ inches. Write two or three bullets for each accomplishment. Word them different ways. If you have the time, create a new resume or job review. Don’t throw away your practice bullets yet. They will come in handy tomorrow.