Resumes statistics

Resume claims tend to describe attention: how long a recruiter looks, what they look at, whether a document is read at all. Attention is genuinely hard to measure, which is why the small number of real studies here are eye-tracking experiments with modest samples rather than large surveys.

The recurring failure is dropping the sample size. A figure derived from thirty recruiters is a useful indication; quoted bare, it reads as a measured constant of the labour market.

The second failure is treating a description as advice. A study showing where attention falls during a first pass does not establish that changing a resume changes an outcome, and none of the studies we reviewed tested that.