The same goes for recent grads. 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. Most resumes should be two pages long. Two pages are the standard length in to fit all your keywords, work history, experience, and skills on your resume.
Here are some situations that indicate you should use a two-page resume:. You have enough relevant skills, experience, and keywords to fill at least a page and a half. Your resume will most likely need two pages to show your career progression. These are both excellent opportunities to fit in more keywords. For highly skilled applicants, a two-page resume will also fit all your relevant experience , education , certifications , and additional training.
Your resume should rarely be three pages or more. Most of the information for a three-page resume is better suited for a LinkedIn profile or a comprehensive CV. For example, a scientist may need more than two pages to showcase background, education, published work, and studies.
An executive resume usually shows a clear progression of responsibility and job titles with many related experiences. Your professional document can be three pages if you are actually writing a Curriculum Vitae CV. Federal resumes also follow a different format and can easily be three pages or more. For most job searches, you should focus on your most recent 10 to 15 years of experience.
Read our article on writing an effective LinkedIn profile for more information. Once you have a draft to work from, use the 10 tips below to add or subtract your resume length.
Your potential employer wants to see your most recent skills and experience. This applies to the work experience descriptions on your resume , as well. If you had the same responsibilities under multiple entries, consider including it only under the position you held most recently. Put the focus on your most recent professional experience. Exception: education. Your hard-earned degrees are almost always relevant, no matter how long ago you earned them.
Dates of tenure c. Description of role and achievement 4. Education 5. Skills 6. Ideally, a resume should be one page—especially for students, new graduates and professionals with one to 10 years of experience. The reason for this standard is that employers and hiring managers typically only have a few seconds to review your resume, so you should provide the most relevant and impressive information as succinctly as possible.
If you do have many years of relevant experience that results in a multi-page resume, is it acceptable to employers? The straightforward answer to this question is yes. However, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind if your resume spills onto two or even three pages:. Communicating your most important and relevant information as briefly as possible is crucial. Recruiters and employers only have a few moments to decide whether or not your resume is a good fit for the role.
In keeping with this practice, be critical of every point you include on your resume. Here are a few ways to make your resume more concise:. Study the job description to get a better idea of what the employer may be looking for in your resume and what potential keywords to include. Second, a study by TopResume 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. Not exactly. While entry-level candidates should no longer feel pressured to cut their resumes down to one page, they should not try to stretch their resume to a two-page resume if it doesn't make sense. For example, if you recently graduated from college and did not participate in many of the resume boosters mentioned above e.
The last thing you want to do is add irrelevant details, include outdated information, or get creative with your format in order to extend your resume to a second page. That's a waste of your time and will not impress employers. You're better off sticking with a one-page resume. So, if you're a recent college graduate, remove any references to your high school awards, scholarships, and extracurricular activities. Employers are more interested in the internships you completed, odd jobs you held, relevant experiences you had, and activities you participated in on campus while pursuing your degree.
In addition, if you're further along in your career and have decided to make a major career change, your resume may be reduced to only one page that highlights your transferable skills and parts of your experience that are relevant to this new job goal. If you have been in the workforce for a number of years, you're entitled to a maximum of two full pages of resume real estate.
This rule applies to most senior professionals, whether you've been in the workforce for seven years or 27 years. The reality is that most recruiters spend less than 10 seconds reviewing a resume before deciding whether the applicant should receive further consideration. With so little time to make the right impression, it's important to present a succinct document that highlights the recent — and more relevant — parts of your professional experience, skills, and education.
While I strongly encourage you to limit yourself to a two-page resume, there will be instances where this is near impossible. This often happens to professionals who have never-ending lists of technical skills and proficiencies, a large number of consulting gigs to explain, or a series of published works to include.
If you fall into one of these categories, you may need to use the first part of a third page. However, try to avoid this if possible since there is still a limit to how many pages a resume should be. There are three additional scenarios when your resume length is likely to exceed two standard 8. A skimpy outline that gives little information about you is worse than none at all.
Let your first draft run as many pages as you need to get all the facts down. Then rewrite— and cut ruthlessly. A few strong opinions aside, the prevailing advice is that your resume should be exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer , while also being as brief as possible without selling yourself short.
This advice is squishy, subjective, and open for interpretation. Most job seekers land somewhere in the one-to-three page range, yet some two page resumes would be much better off as one, and vice versa. Some factors that determine your resume length include:. These and other aspects of your experience might compound into a resume draft that is four or five or ten pages long.
Many still stand by this advice. One page made a lot more sense when it was more common to mail, fax, or physically hand your resume to a stranger, but technology has mitigated many of the associated concerns. Here are some of the other reasons this advice persists beyond the fear of lost pages and pokey staples.
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