Resumes: The Five Second Rule
Several years ago, I was going through submissions for a production of Spring Awakening at the theatre where I was Artistic Director. I happened to be sitting in a friend’s living room while I was clicking through the headshots and resumes. The initial sort was a pretty hefty task. We had received several thousand submissions for the 13 roles available. I needed to sort the submissions quickly so that I could narrow down the possibilities to a more manageable number and really dig in to the actors who might be a fit. Unbeknownst to me, my friend opened his stopwatch app and started timing how long I was spending on each submission.
I like to think that I’m pretty generous when it comes to sorting submissions. I look at every single one and spend what feels like a fair amount of time scanning the page for something relevant to my project.
So I was surprised to learn that the average amount of time my friend clocked me spending on each resume in that initial sort was… 4.5 seconds.
4 and a half seconds.
That is crazy.
AND it makes perfect sense.
Let’s do some quick math.
With an average review time of 4.5 seconds, I can get through 800 clicks in an hour. With several thousand submissions, I’m looking at half of a work day spent simply eliminating the people who are NOT in consideration. After those hours spent, I haven’t actually made much progress because now I need to go back into the shorter pile (narrowed down to several hundred) and re-read the materials with a more focused lens.
If that initial sort can get the numbers down to, say, 400 candidates for the 13 roles, and if I need to get the “please schedule this person for an appointment” pile created by the end of the day, I’m left with about 25 seconds per submission to spend on actually deciding who to call in to audition.
So we are looking at a grand total of 30 seconds spent on viewing each actor who is actually being considered for an audition appointment.
To be clear, the volume of submissions varies per project, so this is not arithmetic I’d live and die by. BUT, the basic point of the arithmetic is consistent project to project:
Your resume needs to be specific, clear, and easily digestible in a very, very short amount of time.
So go and grab your resume. Set your timer for 5 seconds, hit “start”, and then scan your resume until the alarm goes off (and not one second longer).
Is your resume doing a good job of telling your story in that amount of time?
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SIDENOTE: A rant and a plea
Some of you have heard me rant about how ridiculously ineffective and exclusionary I believe resumes to be. (You can hear me talk about this in more detail on this episode of The Dreaded Question). In the digital age, when we are easily able to share real samples of our actual work, it is ludicrous that we are still relying on a piece of digital paper to determine who is invited into the room. In the words of my daughter, “That is SO 1985.”
Resumes are old school. And, frankly, I’m embarrassed that our industry is still using them. We format our resumes in the same way that we did before the computer was invented!!! Something’s gotta give.
So what now?
It is time to invent something new.
The future belongs to those of us who are brave enough to dream of a new way to share our work with the people who might benefit from it.
If you have ideas about how we might innovate the ways in which actors are “screened”, I want to hear them. How might we work together to create a new industry standard that eliminates the use of the old-fashioned resume and replaces it with something more effective and future-focused? Please email me with your ideas. Every idea is welcome. Even ideas that seem outlandish or impossible deserve to be heard. Sometimes the solution comes from the idea that seems least likely to succeed.