Dec 22, 2015

What’s the first thing you look at when you pick up a new book? The cover, right? Despite the old adage, we usually DO judge books first by their covers.

Now consider the last time you watched a movie trailer. Was there something gripping, intriguing, curious or surprising in the first several seconds? Probably.

Why is so much time and money spent on these parts of our media? Once the movie is in the theaters, hardly anyone watches the trailer anymore. They can see the real thing. And once you’ve read the book, you might look back over the cover and see if your initial thoughts were correct, but you likely don’t spend any more time with it than you do that trailer.

The reason these are so important is that they grab our attention. They don’t tell the whole story or even a fraction of it, but they make us want MORE!

The same concept applies to people reading your resume. You’ve probably heard the claims that interviewers spend no more than six seconds looking at a resume before deciding if it’s worth the time to go further. It’s true. With hundreds of resumes to look over, who has time to read more than a few lines?

So as we approach the new year, take a look at your resume. If your resume was a movie trailer, would you pay ten dollars to watch the movie? If it was the cover of a book, would you even open to the first page? That’s what you need to get an interviewer to do in those crucial first six seconds!