Recruiter in
Your Pocket

Evidence library

Research

Resume advice is plentiful. Reliable evidence is harder to find.

We track down the studies, platform documentation, and recruiter experiments—then keep the part that changes what you should do.

445 recruiters
Spelling experiment
694 hiring professionals
Trust experiment
40 recruiters · 60 resumes
Real-document study
Greenhouse + Lever
Current parser documentation

The first-read map

A resume passes through three different reads.

Advice gets muddy when parsing, attention, and judgment are treated as the same problem. They are not.

  1. 01The file

    Can the text be extracted?

    Live text and clear sections give the parser something usable.

  2. 02The scan

    Can the evidence be found?

    Role, scope, dates, and outcomes need a clear reading path.

  3. 03The judgment

    Does the evidence support a closer look?

    The reader weighs relevance, ownership, progression, and results.

Your report works backward from the decision. It shows where real evidence becomes hard to find—and the first honest fix worth making.

Four findings worth acting on

Strong evidence changes what we check. Weak evidence stays out of the headline.

Finding 01

Do spelling mistakes actually change the decision?

Yes—when they pile up. In a 2023 experiment, resumes with five spelling errors received an 18.5 percentage-point lower interview probability than error-free versions.

What this changes in your report

We flag visible errors because they can cast doubt on otherwise strong work—not because one typo predicts job performance.

See our explanation Read the study

Source

Sterkens et al., PLOS ONE (2023)

Factorial survey experiment with 445 genuine recruiters evaluating resumes across eight occupations.

Claims under review

Three resume rules that need to go.

Each sounds certain. The research is more specific.

01

Every recruiter spends exactly six seconds on a resume.

Treat the opening as high-value space, but do not write for a stopwatch. No study establishes one universal timer or scan path.

See the research
02

An ATS rejects a resume because it does not reach a magic score.

Make the file easy to parse and the evidence easy to find. There is no universal ATS score shared across employers and platforms.

See the research
03

A resume should always fit on one page.

Use the space your relevant evidence needs. The real rule is that page two must earn the read.

See the research

All research

Read the evidence behind the advice.

Browse the underlying research on first impressions, writing, getting found, and hiring systems.

Apply it to your resume

Your report uses the same evidence standards to show what is clear, what needs more context, and what to fix first.

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