The 3 Things Recruiters Notice in 6 Seconds (And How to Fix Yours)

I've sat on the other side of the resume pile. Six seconds isn't an exaggeration—it's the average time a recruiter spends before deciding to keep reading or move on. So let's talk about what actually happens in those six seconds. **Thing #1: Your Job Title and Company Names** Recruiters scan for relevance. If they're hiring for a propulsion engineer at SpaceX, they're looking for words like "propulsion," "turbo machinery," "combustion," or relevant internship names. If your most relevant experience is buried under a part-time barista job, you've lost them. Fix: Lead with your most relevant experience. If you did a project on liquid engine injector design, that goes above your retail summer job—even if the project was unpaid or academic. **Thing #2: Quantified Impact** Generic bullet points scream "junior candidate." Compare these: - "Worked on a student rocket team" - "Led propulsion subteam of 12 students; designed injector achieving 92% combustion efficiency in static fire tests" The second one tells a recruiter three things: leadership, technical specificity, and measurable outcome. That's six-second gold. Fix: Every bullet should have a number, a technical detail, or both. If you can't quantify it, ask yourself if it belongs on the resume at all. **Thing #3: Visual Scannability** If your resume is a wall of text with no clear hierarchy, the recruiter's brain skips it. They look for: bold role titles, clear date alignment, clean section headers, and breathing room between entries. Fix: Use one font, generous margins, and bold only for job titles and company names. Don't over-design—engineers get skeptical of overly stylized resumes. Clean beats clever every time. Most students lose opportunities not because they're unqualified, but because they make the recruiter work too hard to find the signal. Your resume isn't a biography—it's a 6-second pitch. This is exactly what we drill into students at FormAWin. We review resumes line-by-line, rebuild weak bullets, and test them against real recruiter feedback—so when the six seconds come, you don't waste them. Book a strategy call if you want yours reviewed by people who've actually hired for NASA, SpaceX, and Lockheed Martin.