How Long Should A Resume Be In 2022
So, how many pages should a resume be?
While the ideal length depends on a number of factors, the main goal is to keep it as short as possible while conveying enough information to catch the readers eye.
Below, we dive into the common question: How long should a resume be?. The answer may surprise you!
How Long Should A College Resume Be
A resume for college should be one page. Do you have so many mind-altering achievements you cant fit them in a 1-page resume? Then write a two-page resume.
Expert Hint: If youre in a field where lots of experience makes you more attractive, write a 2 or 3-page resume. Just keep it relevant and focus on accomplishments.
How To Reduce Your Cv Size
1) Is it all relevant?
Remember: you dont need to include everything. Youre advertising yourself for a role, not giving them your life story.
Take your employment history: while the paper round you did when you were 14 may have built your confidence, unless youre going for the job of senior paper delivery boy, your employer probably wont need to know.
The same goes for your interests. You may like eating out, and long walks along the beach but the reality is that the person reading your CV probably doesnt care. We all enjoy socialising with friends.
Keep it pertinent and, above all, relevant.
3) Are you afraid of the white space?
Nearly all recruiters will be skim reading your CV, so always avoid trying to cram as much information in as possible.
You need to grab their attention, and keep them interested. Presentation can be just as important as the content. Dont be afraid of the gaps. Be bold. Use bullet points
Keep the focus on what you want them to see, and draw attention to any key facts or bits of information that may be relevant. Leave out everything else.
And whilst you may think that moving the margins and changing the typeface is a clever way around this, itll only make your CV stand out for the wrong reasons.
5) Are you getting straight to the point?
This not only reduces length, it also makes sentences more active, giving your accomplishments greater authority. Play to your strengths, but get straight to the point.
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Keep Your Experience Clear And Concise
Another reason many job seekers go over the recommended resume length is because they include too much information for each position they held. Don’t use paragraphs when describing your work experience. Instead, use clear and concise bullet points on your resume.
Our team of 100+ career experts, professional resume writers, and former recruiters recommend that you use 4 to 6 bullet points for each position.
That keeps your work experience focused and relevant while remaining easy for hiring managers to scan.
What Should Your Resume Do
Do you know how long the average manager spends reading a resume? Six seconds.
If your resume doesnt deliver the goods Why you need me to boost your profits quickly, you lose. See Resume Blasphemy and Put a Free Sample in Your Resume, pp. 23-26, in How Can I Change Careers? Heres a brief excerpt from the book to get you thinking about your resume in a new, potent way:
Give the prospective employer a free sample of what you can do. This will get the employers attention and it will distinguish you as a job hunter whose goal is to do the job for the employer, rather than just to get a job You need to package the information in a way that says explicitly to a prospective employer: This is what I can do for you. Before you can deliver this job-offer-eliciting gift, you need to understand an employers needs. That means understanding the problems and challenges his company faces. And that can take quite a bit of research. Do it. There are no shortcuts to delivering value.
Make your resume as long as it needs to be. Does it deliver instant answers to the questions on the managers mind? If you dont know what those questions are, youre not ready to write that resume. When youre ready, youll know exactly how long it needs to be.
How long is your resume? How long is too long? More important, how do you use your resume? Whats the interview yield of the resumes you hand out?
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How To Make Your Resume Fit The Appropriate Page Length
In order to help you meet these resume-length tips, limit the amount of experience you include to the last 15 years and tailor your resume to a 15-year window. Employers care most about the recent work you’ve been doing and how it ties back to their role’s requirements, so place the emphasis of your resume on your current and relevant experience.
There are a number of ways you can incorporate your earlier experience into the resume without spilling over into a third or fourth page.
Maximize The Line Spacing
And by maximize, I mean use as little as possible, obviously. In Microsoft Word, you can manually set the spacing between lines and new sections. It frequently defaults to something quite generous, so at the very least, change it so that there is no additional spacing between lines.
You can fiddle with this under the paragraph settings. While youre messing with the line spacing, go ahead and set your entire resume to 10-point font .
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Whats The Ideal Resume Length For The Hiring Manager
CV length is the difference between an experienced candidate and an irrelevant candidate. If your resume is too long, its a complete waste of time to go through.
On the other hand, if a resume is too short they wont get an overview of your suitability for the position. Its good practice to scope out the hiring preferences of the company you are applying to. This will allow you to tailor your resume to the known preferences of your hiring manager to give you the best chance of getting noticed and called for an interview.
Lets take a look at this a bit further by breaking down an entry-level resume and an executive-level resume.
Hiring Managers Want Clear Career Stories
Second, a study by TopResume on professional vs self-written resumes found that employers value resumes that provide a strong career narrative. In other words, recruiters want to see more than merely a timeline of your professional and educational experience they want to be able to read your resume like a story. In order to create that story, your resume requires additional components such as a professional summary, a section to list your relevant experience, skills etc. all of which take up more space.
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Can A Resume Be 2 Pages
Yes, a resume can be two pages long. A two-page resume is a good choice if you have more than 6 years of relevant job experience. In this case, a two-page resume may even be necessary to convey all of the critical information an employer needs to know. Also, two-page resumes are usually accepted for academia and grad school applications.
How To Shorten Your Resume
Cut ruthlessly isnt one-time advice. Your resume should be tailored to each new job for which you apply. That means what youre cutting should be different every time.
Write up everything into master resume
If rewriting your resume each time requires more time and energy than you have, consider maintaining a comprehensive master resume as a starting point for each tailored job application. List each and every duty, responsibility, hard skill, soft skill, and measurable result throughout your professional history.
Instead of rewriting a new resume for each job, this allows you to skip straight to the ruthless cutting for each new job.
Answer the question of the job description
Your resume is more than proof that youve been collecting a paycheck for however many years. An effective resume highlights exactly how youve been working toward the job for which youre applying. See the difference?
Study the job description and identify the most important qualifications and resume keywords. Review each line of your resume and think, Does this help prove that Im a great fit for this job? If not, its extraneous at best or distracting at worse. Cut it.
Jobscan helps you home in on whats important to the employer by instantly analyzing your resume against their job description. Try it out right here in the article:
Emphasize your most relevant experience
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Why Your Resume Should Be One Page
Your resume can safely stick to one page if that is all you need to market yourself. One page resumes can be scanned over quickly by the human eye, so a one-page resume could appeal to in-person scenarios like job fairs and networking events.
If you have a two-page resume with no work experience, it probably contains filler words and information that isnât relevant to your current job application. Cut your resume down to one page by tailoring your resume to your relevant experience.
If youâre making a career change, your past experience is unlikely to be fully relevant to the new job target. Try to lead with your transferable skills and abilities if youâre in this position, rather than experience. A functional resume format may be better for you.
The same goes for recent grads. Odds are that you donât have two pages of relevant experience. However, some graduates have multiple internships, volunteer work, on-campus activities, or publications that belong on a resume. If you just graduated, read more about how to search for a job as a recent graduate.
When Two Page Resumes Are Okay
Including a second page to communicate key experiences, achievements, projects or other relevant information that show your direct qualifications for a role is absolutely acceptable to employers. Alternatively, if those two pages are filled with irrelevant information such as unrelated job duties or hobbies, this can be a turn-off and put your application at risk of being passed over.
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Though higher-level candidates like executives tend to have lengthier resumes due to more experience, level is not necessarily an indicator of how many pages a resume should be. While senior professionals may have an extremely well-crafted one-page resume packed full of concise, relevant information, students may also have two pages full of applicable projects, coursework, leadership experiences and internships.
When deciding on resume length, the key is to create the most concise, relevant and easy to read document possible. If possible, err on the side of one page, but not at the expense of readability. Whether your resume is one or multiple pages, length is secondary to quality content and high clarity.
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Tailor Your Resume To Each Application
Many job-seekers assume that their resume should list most of the jobs theyve held in their lives. However, this is only the case if youre writing a job-seeker CV outside of North America.
The best way to ensure you achieve the proper resume length when writing your resume is to tailor it directly to the position you want.
Every job you apply for has different requirements and qualifications. Whenever you apply for a new job, your resume should change to reflect these requirements.
For example, service industry jobs can teach highly valuable soft skills. However, if youre writing a , including information about your experience waiting tables is irrelevant and should be left off.
To tailor your resume, start by looking at the job description, and remove anything that isnt directly mentioned in the listing. In particular, look out for specific skills theyre looking for, and how many years of experience they want.
Reducing your resume to only the most relevant information not only helps you fit it on one page, it also makes you look perfectly suited for the position.
Additionally, remove any positions that you held a long time ago. If youre unsure how far back your resume should go, just omit anything over 1015 years old.
Why Was One Page The Right Choice
Catching attention
Gal had all the experience in the world, but his aim wasnt listing as much as possible in his work experience section, skills section or education section.
His aim was to catch HRs attention.
Recruiters can look at resumes for less than 7.4 seconds. Having a long, drawn-out resume might be the difference between the No and the Maybe pile.
Gals one-pager gives a quick, non-exhaustive record of his work history and talents. He knew once he secured an interview he could get the job. Catching the attention of the recruiter with a succinct resume was therefore vital.
Staying concise
There was no need to include multiple pages as Gals descriptions were concise and to-the-point.
He went into detail on his most recent job and kept other relevant experience down to two bullet points. His industry expertise was conveyed quickly using one-word visuals too.
Business development is rooted in your ability to communicate and do so as effectively as possible. Gal knew recruiters would be looking for a short few words on how he has led previous businesses to success.
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Senior Level And Science Candidates
Executives or senior-level managers often have a long list of accomplishments and experiences that they have to include. The same is true for people in the sciences or academia who want to include their licenses, patents, or publications. These job seekers can write a resume that is three pages long or even longer.
How To Shorten My Resume
You might be thinking, how could I fit everything into a single page? One section of a resume might need more space than another, but then it restricts me from fitting everything into one
For example, if youre using a functional resume and have different skills such as:
- Computer skills
- Soft skills
- Hard skills
Even if youre using a different resume layout , theres always that thought of wanting to include more things. Its always good to mention additional experience but it can sometimes have the opposite effect.
To learn how to shorten your resume to two pages or one page, use the following key tips:
If the answer is no, you can remove it.
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So Is It Okay To Have A Three
It depends but generally no, a resume should almost never be more than two pages long.
Why?
A hiring manager only skims a resume for a few seconds before deciding to either look into it in more detail or send it to the rejection pile. You want to give them a resume thatâs clean, concise, and relevant. There is just no reason to take more than two pages to do that.
Hiring managers often have hundreds of applicants per job posting, and may be hiring for multiple positions at a time. A long resume might annoy a hiring manager, since the information is likely not all relevant.
Generally, your goal is to effectively communicate that you’re right for the job in as little space as possible.
Improve Your Resumes Formatting
Finally, a longer resume allows you to pay attention to readability and presentation. Some job seekers resort to small type and meager margins to make a resume fit in one page.
But small type and narrow margins are not good for readability and presentation. In fact, they make resumes hard to read. Many hiring managers may shrink from reading teeny-tiny type all, even if the resume has made it through the ATS.
Human personnel spend just a few seconds skimming resumes. Successful resumes need to incorporate that fact, and be very easy to skim. Easy-to-read type and reasonable margins contribute to readability, as do bullet points and lists.
Specifically, use at least an 11-point typeface in a standard business typeface, such as Ariel or Calibri. Each margin should be at least one inch.
When youre using a two-page resume, part of the presentation should consider the second page, too. Be sure to fill at least one-third of the second page. Why? Because if the second page covers less than that, it may strike a reviewer as a tacked-on afterthought. In fact, if it fills just a few lines on the second page, it may look like a mistake. Make sure it neither looks nor reads that way!
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Why You Should Consider Creating A Two
If you are a mid-level professional, there are several good reasons for creating a two-page resume. Perhaps the most important of these is that many companies now use an automated applicant tracking system to carry out the initial screening of the resumes they receive .
Such systems are programmed to privilege resumes that use and repeat specific keyword phrasesthe bots assess both the placement and the frequency of industry-specific keywords in a resume. They also look for the length of experience one has in using particular job skills.
Expanding your resume to two pages will enable you to repeat these essential keywords throughout your professional experience section.
Although this may seem awkward and redundant stylistically, it is one of the best ways to ensure that your resume is one of the scanned resumes that actually make it to the stage where it will be considered by the human eye of a hiring manager.