When Is It Not Acceptable
From an entry-level candidate to a professional with less than 20 years of experience, a 3-page resume is neither necessary or wanted.
Keep the information you include on your resume relevant and powerful.
So you have a general idea as to what resume length to aim for in correlation with how much experience you have.
How do you make sure that your content is eye-catching and engaging?
Well walk you through that now.
What Is A Resume Summary
A resume summary is a brief statement that summarizes your resume. It also acts as a professional profile that quickly describes how your work history will add value in future roles. Keep in mind the resume summary statement is distinct from the resume objective statement while an objective is focused on your needs, a resume summary is employer-focused.
The summary should go directly below your contact information at the top of your resume. It looks something like this:
Weâll show you how to write a great summary no matter where you are in your career. Here is what this post will cover:
How To Fit A Resume On One Single Page
Lets get real.
An entry-level applicant can insert all relevant information under one page because he/she doesnt have much relevant experience. The alternative is appearing like theyre not making a serious enough effort to write a concise application.
For folks with more experience, however, this can be a bit trickier.
Here are some tips on how to turn your resume into a concise one-pager:
Don’t Miss: How To Add A Resume To Indeed
Format Your Cover Letter Properly
- Set the margins to one inch on every side.
- Choose the best cover letter fonts and make sure theyre in the 1014pt range.
- Use single or 1.15 line spacing. Dont use double line spacing in a cover letter.
- Make good use of white space. It gives your cover letter breathing room.
Mention one of your biggest achievements thats relevant to the position youre targeting.
For more details, read our dedicated guide on how to start a cover letter in a captivating way.
And
Learn how to address your cover letter properly to stand out from the other applicants right off the bat.
Get Rid Of Experience That Is Not Relevant
If youâre currently looking for an accounting job, use your vital resume space to focus on jobs that are most likely to make you stand out as a potential hire. Your most recent jobs working in the accounting field are going to carry the most weight with hiring managers. However, you probably donât need to waste space listing all the babysitting and dog walking jobs you held in high school to make some pocket change. Those jobs, while they might have been great at the time, are probably not going to tip the scales when it comes to landing a great accounting job.
You May Like: Presentations On Cv
How Many Pages Should Your Resume Be
The appropriate length for a resume varies based on factors such as the type of position you are applying for and the length of your relevant education and experience. Generally, the standard expectation is for a resume to fit on a single page. However, there are certain circumstances in which two- or three-page resumes are more appropriate. Your resume should include the number of pages that are necessary to include all relevant content about your qualifications without making sacrifices to the style, design or format of your resume.
Related: How Long Should a Resume Be?
Include A Career Note In A Senior
If you only held one or two positions before the 15-year cut-off, you can provide a short career note that mentions the roles and titles you held.
This format gives you some flexibility, as you may decide to summarize a few very similar roles into a short blurb to keep your resume length under two pages. For instance, you may say that your earlier experience includes … executive assistant work for companies including Company A, Company B, and Company C. If you worked with some name-drop worthy clients, you have the ability to work those details into a blurb like this as well. However, the rule of thumb is to keep this note short and sweet, so eliminate unnecessary details such as employment dates.
Click on the following link to see the entire two-page sample resume for a senior professional.
Read Also: Where To Put Graduated Summa Cum Laude On Resume
Keep Your Cover Letter Personal
Last but not least, lets talk about cover letters. For these, you want to capture the readers attention right away. One foolproof way to do this is to address the reader by their actual title.
You can usually find this information through a professional networking site like LinkedIn. Robbins recommended identifying a shortlist of 15 to 25 target employers. Reach out to current employees in similar roles. Remember, though, that online networking is not unlike real-life networking, so pitching yourself early isnt usually a good idea, she said. Take time to build trust and engage with others in a supportive way. Let people know youre available and would love to be considered for a current opening.
A few suggestions:
- I noticed from your LinkedIn profile that youve been at the company for X years. What do you love most about being there? What has kept you from pursuing work somewhere else?
- On the company careers page, I read that X is one of your company values. What does that look like for someone in your role? How do you see it in practice?
- Are there any skills or practices that youd recommend I brush up on to find a role like yours at your company?
Now ask yourself, Knowing this, how can I contribute to those areas if I were hired for the role? What makes my contribution unique? Write that in your cover letter.
How Long Should A Resume Be In 2020
A typical resume should be one or two pages long.
- One page resumes are ideal for recent grads, entry-level resumes, or in-person networking
- Two page resumes are great for most job seekers, particularly those with five-plus years experience in their current field
- Three page resumes might benefit accomplished senior-level workers or technical professionals with large bodies of work
You May Like: How To Put Masters On Resume
How To Write A Resume Summary
Help recruiters or hiring managers quickly gain a sense of who you are as a candidate with your resume summary.
A resume summary delivers a concise story about your experience to help recruiters or hiring managers quickly gain a sense of who you are as a candidateâand what you have to offer. In this article, weâll cover when you should use a resume summary, what it should typically include, and examples you can follow to craft your own.
How To Get Your Resume Noticed
Eye-tracking research has shown that an HR professional will review your resume for a mere seven seconds, and companies are increasingly using automation to screen resumes.
- The days of sending a generic CV are out. You need to be able to stand out and make the connection that lands an interview.
- Experts share five fresh and practical ways you can do this: 1) Outsmart the robots 2) Show off your skills 3) Dont restrict your work experience to just work 4) Let the numbers do the talking and 5) Keep your cover letter personal.
Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here.
How long does it take a recruiter to decide if youre right for a job? Its actually around seven seconds, according to eye-tracking research. To put that into perspective, close your eyes and take two deep breaths. Thats the time, on average, hiring managers spend skimming your resume, sizing up your history, hopes, and dreams before either tossing it into the trash or moving you to the next round of the application process.
For those of us just entering the workforce or looking to make a career transition, one thing is clear: We need to find ways to stand out and fast. While there is a plethora of guidance on the Internet surrounding how to be a great candidate, it can be contradictory or confusing depending on where and when you look.
Here is what Ive learned:
Don’t Miss: Should You Have A Skills Section On Your Resume
Why Was Adding A Second Page The Right Choice
Showing you who he is
HRs are interested in culture fit to identify whether employees practices and passions align with the employers goals.
Daniel opens his resume with a short summary of his career, and later goes on to provide useful links where the HR can learn more about him .
Using a two-page resume, he didnt have to worry whether including these details would detract from his previous experience.
Is it bad to have a 2-page resume?
Working in technical support and engineering obviously requires a certain level of technical expertise.
Hiring managers need to clearly see the extent of Daniels knowledge on his resume. This means exploring the projects hes worked on and the technologies he has experience with. He dedicates just under two full pages explaining these and highlights his own projects under a Projects section.
This shows the extent of Daniels knowledge along with his initiative and ability.
What Is Resume Screening
Resume screening is the process of determining whether a candidate is qualified for a role based his or her education, experience, and other information captured on their resume.
In a nutshell, its a form of pattern matching between a jobs requirements and the qualifications of a candidate based on their resume.
The goal of screening resumes is to decide whether to move a candidate forward usually onto an interview or to reject them.
Watch our 2-minute video on resume screening using AI below:
You May Like: How To Write Magna Cum Laude On Resume
Adding References To Your Cv
You may be thinking, What? Why not? References in a CV are surely standard practice? References are generally requested further along in the recruitment process, so theres really no benefit to adding them to your CV, and they just take up value space. And according to StandOut CV, the benefits of leaving your references out of your CV, far outweigh the benefits of including them.
Including Additional Dates On Your Resume
If you’ve taken professional development courses or other educational classes, it’s not necessary to list dates. If you have certifications, you should list the dates because employers will want to know that your accreditations are current.
When leaving experience and dates off a resume, do it strategically.
A resume, for example, with only a few jobs when you’re an experienced candidate or a resume with no dates at all, can be a red flag for hiring managers. Be sure your resume provides a clear synopsis of your work history to employers.
If the positions you held earlier in your career are relevant to your current objectives, consider shortening the descriptions of your jobs to reduce the length of your resume rather than deleting the positions from your resume.
Read Also: How To Put Resume On Indeed
How Many Years Of Experience Should You Include
How should you decide what to include? If you are uncertain how many years of experience to include on your resume, let the job posting be your guide. In general, 10 years of experience is standard, but you may need to include more depending on the employer’s requirements and how your qualifications fit those requirements.
If a job requires 20 years of experience, for example, you’ll want to include more than 10 – 15 years of work history.
Include positions from earlier in your career that are relevant to the role you are applying for.
It’s acceptable to include 10 – 15 years of experience on your resume. In many industries, sharing experience that dates back more than 15 years just isn’t very helpful for hiring managers. It doesn’t support your candidacy to share an experience with tools and technology that are no longer in use.
Plus, when you have many years of experience, listing it all can flag you as an older job seeker to employers.
What To Include In The Summary Statement
Every truly powerful and professional resume summary contains some very vital elements. If yours doesnât manage to relay the following critical information, chances are that the person reading it will be less than impressed.
-
Personal traits. Again, no one wants to read your entire psych-profile in your summary. However, you should be able to take a handful of personal and professional attributes that you possess and summarize them in a way that shows the recruiter why you are the right person for that job and the firm.
-
Notable achievements. Can you think of a few truly notable achievements that you managed to accomplish in your past employment? These can be new projects that you helped to launch, new departments that you brought to life, or similar things that had a dramatic impact on your previous employersâ businesses.
-
Your expertise. Include some information about your educational qualifications and any experience that you might have that separates you from other candidates for the job.
-
Your skill set. You also need to include some highlights detailing your strongest and most relevant skills–with an emphasis on those that are most relevant to the job youâre seeking. Many of these will double as keywords, which we talk about in the next section.
Don’t Miss: How To Make Resume Lines On Word
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.
Highlight Former Achievements In A New Way
Of course, if you’ve got an impressive accomplishment or title sitting outside that two-decade limit, include it.
“If 30 years ago is the role where you discovered a patent still in use today, you ought to mention that,” says Ceniza-Levine.
You have a few different options for how you chose to work that information in. If a title you’ve held or company you’ve worked for is likely to impress a recruiter, consider a section called “earlier work history” or something similar where you can simply list previous jobs, by noting only the title, company and location, says Amanda Augustine, a career coach with TopResume. Or you could try including it in a “career notes” or “career highlights” section at the bottom of your current work experience by writing something like: “additional experience working for ABC company or serving clients like XYZ,” adds Augustine.
If the role you want to include is one where you did discover a patent or win an impressive industry award, you could also draw attention to this by folding such an achievement into the summary statement, which is typically a short paragraph at the top of your resume that acts as an elevator pitch to readers selling your skills and experience. Or you could include it in a section following your work history that lists awards or accomplishments you’ve earned over the course of your career.
Don’t Miss: Applying For Two Jobs At Same Company
How To Decide The Length Of Your Resume
Because your resume is the primary document you use to market yourself during a job search, it is important to make sure it includes as much relevant information about your skills, experiences and accomplishments as possible. But it is also important to make sure you know how long your resume should be. Knowing the appropriate length for your resume can help you determine which information you should and should not include in your resume.
In this definitive guide to resume length, we discuss everything you need to know to help you decide how many pages your resume should be.
How Far Back Should You Go On A Resume
CareerBuilder | January 28, 2021
Should you include those early years on your resume? Here’s how to determine what to keep – and what to ditch.
Today’s hiring managers have stacks of applications to get through quickly, so job seekers need to make each moment count when presenting themselves to prospective employers. While every candidate wants to give a thorough picture of accomplishments and skills, is it necessary to list every single job ones ever held on a resume?
Determining how many years of work history to include on your resume can be a tricky task and is highly dependent on the unique situation of every job seeker. While the standard rule of thumb is to include roughly your last 10 years of work experience, this may not always make sense. Its critical that you consider how relevant and important older pieces of work experience are to the jobs that you are currently looking for. If some of your earlier jobs are able to effectively communicate the strengths and abilities that you want to emphasize to your future employer, then by all means include them on your resume. On the flip side, if some more recent positions that you’ve held are completely irrelevant to the jobs you are now seeking, it may be best to leave them off your resume.
Here are some scenarios to consider and tips for what to include.
An example of how to do this:
Customer Service Operator, 1998 2003 Company 1, Company 2, Company 3, Company 4
Company ABC
You May Like: Does A 16 Year Old Need A Resume