When you have insight, you have a feeling, emotion, or thought that helps you know something essential about a person or thing. Understanding isn't based on hard facts or evidence; it has nothing to do with using your senses, such as sight or smell. Making a job change and making the right decision comes from feelings that may be connected to experience or observations.
Studies have shown that the average recruiter scans a resume for six to seven seconds before deciding if the applicant is a good fit for the role. To some degree, insight must be a factor in those few seconds. The same is likely true for the employer’s human resource department, but in that case, the resume may already have gone through resume scanning software (ATS), and they may not even see it at all. A report from Jobscan Research in 2018 said that at least 98.2% of Fortune 500 use applicant tracking systems.
Your resume has a short time to make a good impression and be considered worth looking further at, so an important question is what areas are looked at first.
There are a lot of lists of things thought most important, which are looked at first on resumes. Still, the ones that appear on all of them are your name and history: title, company, position start and end dates, title, company, position start, and education.
Your current title likely is a keyword that confirms you are the right match; if it is good news, use it in your cover letter and conversations.
Often the focus of the 7-second search is looking for keywords.
Too bad we can’t find and make sure we use that secret list of words. The reality is that the keyword list is different for each job. Studying the posting and seeing what is most important to the company about the job becomes essential. It may be the extent of knowledge about a candidate’s process or the insight into the use of products. When it seems clear, what is most important than asking what keywords come to mind is how the best keywords can be found.
First and foremost, employers want to know if you're qualified, but the job posting likely will identify which words focus on the qualifications.
Hiring managers spend most of their precious scanning time skimming through resumes to identify keywords that match the job description.
