Six Second Resume Test: Make Your Biotech Resume Survive the Scan

You have six seconds to impress a recruiter and get them to keep scrolling on your resume. This week I'm teaching you exactly what needs to be at the top of your resume in order to capture that attention. Now, I did this in the community as a little live event and as such it is a visual podcast so if you can go to YouTube, you definitely should. I'm showing an actual resume now. I do talk through it, but when I was teaching I was definitely using visual aids. So I would love it if you would head over to our YouTube or watch the video in our player app. With that, let's get into exactly what you need to do at the top of your resume to make recruiters love you and decide to shortlist you for an interview. I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees so I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're in the right place. I get a lot of questions, especially from brand new members about the resume template format and the questions often come in the form of so and so at my school career center said to organize my resume like this or I got this advice from this person at this company. I get a lot of people who come in with a lot of different disparate advice and my advice is unlearn everything that you have learned before because it's probably coming from people who don't for a living look at resumes. So one of the things that I really formed my template resume on was what was working to gather to get attention for my recruiting team. So we really dug into which resumes we advance, which ones we liked, and I asked other recruiters and we took more of a scientific method to figuring out exactly what should go in a resume template. Looking at all of the advice out there and here's the thing, I want to share my screen again, but I'm going to show you now one of the template resumes that I prepared for you so that you can see what this looks like. When I open up a resume in an applicant tracking system, I open it up Pretty big because your eyes get tired after a lot after looking at hundreds of resumes. So in a typical search, here's, here's one of our template resumes. In a typical search. In a typical job, we may get two to 500 applicants, sometimes more, depending on the job. And we are not using AI to screen out those. We are often using keywords to filter down and look at the best resumes that contain the keywords, but we're not filtering them out automatically. So I am still on the hook for looking at a lot of resumes. And it is a very well documented statistic from a lot of applicant tracking systems. So applicant tracking systems track how long it takes us to actually go through resumes. So when I open up 200 resumes in a queue and I'm starting to go through those resumes, it's actually timing me on how long I spend on each resume before I give it a thumbs down. Okay, so the average, the industry average is 6 seconds. If you're going to get a thumbs down, in other words, we're going to reject you. It takes us about six seconds on average to make that decision. Now, conversely, if we don't reject you within those six seconds, we're probably going to spend significantly longer looking at your resume and really scroll and look at it. So with all of that in mind, you have six seconds to capture my attention and make me not hit the thumbs down button. So everything at the top of your resume, and I call this above the fold. That's old newspaper speak. When you hear me say above the fold, just think of the top half of the first page of your resume. This is what loads up. This is what a recruiter sees immediately out of the gate. This must be absolutely dialed in so that I get all of the information that I'm looking for to continue looking at the resume within six seconds. So I spend a lot of time telling people this. This is why I'm going over it. I think it's so, so, so important. Let's just break this down. What is on this resume? Obviously, this is a resume that I created for myself to just show you things. So the contact information, all that is fake. But immediately I'm calling out that I have a PhD. Now, you don't have to put your education at the top of the resume. If the job requires a PhD, put PhD and it's done. Like, you have checked that box for me. The next is just a really short section with my contact info. Notice there's no address up here. I don't Want any preconceived notions about where a candidate should be located at this point? Take your address off of your resume if you have work authorization. And that's a common question for you. And I just have to say we still are seeing, like if somebody has a name that is clearly not a United States based name, we are still at this moment more than ever worried are we going to be able to hire that person? And so if you have a green card, work authorization, any of that stuff, stick it right up there. Next, I have a one sentence, snappy, short headline, not a big long paragraph. Notice, don't make me read it. Should be really quick. I should be able to read this sentence in about a second and a half. All right? It should contain the job title of the job you're applying for. It should contain some of the language of the job. So a lot of what we're doing with our resume tailoring is bringing the language that's unique to that job into this piece. Okay, put it up there. Language of the job right out in front. Then it should have a couple of elements of the job description as well. So for this particular role, this fake resume I made was for a real job. In this real job was a talent acquisition leadership position. It was in the medical device space. So I've got that in there. And they wanted somebody who had experience building talent acquisition teams. So I've gotten all of those elements in here. So right now this recruiter who's opened this up is nodding and going, okay, those are all the things I'm looking for. Now I have these professional highlights. Now, you couldn't read these in 6 seconds. However, I have strategically highlighted or bolded one word ish in each. So a keyword in each of these bullet points so that now this recruiter can just let their eyeballs ping pong down and see that I'm hitting all the keywords that they're looking for in this job description. I have now passed the 6 second test. This recruiter is nodding. They're saying, okay, I see all the things I want to see right here. This is why you don't put a big list of skills at the top. This is why you don't put your education at the top. This is why you don't launch right into your experience. The highlight section is a lovely place to curate pieces of experience from all over your history. If you launch right into your experience, and maybe not everything in your most recent experience is the most relevant for that job, you might have lost me. Don't Lose me, Give me the highlights. Real I've been using the analogy of like your highlights is a lot like a movie trailer. So people worry about being repetitive in their highlight section. Well, I said that in, you know, this experience or that experience. Don't worry about that. Because if you think about a movie trailer, a movie trailer is very repetitive for what the movie is. You see actual scenes from the movie and they stitch them all together in a way that makes you excited to see the movie. Right? That is what you're doing in your highlight section. You're going to stitch together the most relevant things from all of your experience and whet that recruiter's appetite to go find out where you did that. That's all you're doing. It's a movie trailer for your career. That is the reason that we really focus on what is at the top of the resume. If you want my resume templates, I have three beautiful Applicant Tracking System approved resume templates with matching cover letter templates available in the community. So bump on in there and grab them. I also have a longer version of this Q and A where I go over a few more things that have to do with the resumes, but I wanted to share this because it is such a frequently asked question. People have so many ideas about what goes at the top of that resume, so I really do hope that's clarified and we'll see you in the community. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach Podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support resources and materials and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn Pro Tip when you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. Have an amazing week and follow. We'll see you back here next Friday.