Resume screening

So my mgr hands me a half inch wad of paper this arvo - at first I'm thinking oh boy another doc review. It turns out to be resumes for the prospective interns. Most of the resumes are only 1 or 2 pages at most. I spend about 30 seconds on skim reading the first resume. Half way through I reckon I'm down to 15 seconds. By the of the wad I'm down to about 10 seconds.

So what's the point? Well this is what I've learned (at least IMHO which is probably not typical of ppl in the recruitment process):

• Make your resume look good. Some resumes were like a maze to read. Left, right, up, down, 2 columns becoming 1. Oh boy.
• The online resume submission really butchers your resume. This isn't fair IMHO. Also recruiting filter out which fields they present. And you don't get to use bullet points on your resume. It just becomes ones long paragraph.
• They really do get skim read. By the end of it I was reading just verbs and key words.
• I found myself saying "wtf is this acronym?" a lot.
• Say what kind of position you are looking for. It helps a lot. Most of the applicants were appeared to know about many different things
• Experience counts. Experience and other activities ranked way higher than what courses you did. For academic stuff I looked about as far as the course name. Everyone seemed to have a scholarship/deans list etc etc. Everyone except for me proabably.