My current assignment has changed dramatically and I’ve been out looking for a new job again.
One agency had me clump together my contract assignments so that I had longer blocks of time and didn’t look like a flight risk.
Another had me only list the years and not the months. And made it really short.
Now I’ve found a great job with great pay -but I had to put down every contract and permanent position I’ve had for the past 20 years with as much detail as possible. It filled 7 pages!
She’s going to go through and adjust it - she just wanted to have as much to work with as possible. She told me to expect my resume to be 3-4 pages long at minimum, plus the reference checking reports she adds.
I don’t apologize for my work history - it’s the life you lead as a contract employee. I have a long and valuable list of great references and I’m proud of the work I do. But it gets frustrating sometimes to play the game every time I need a new assignment. Cut down, expand, include, eliminate.
I used to try to keep my resume to 1 page - had heard that was best. But now I’m curious. How many pages is your resume?
I’ve always been a believer in the one page resume, but I don’t know if I could fit my relevant work and educational history on one page anymore without using a four point font. The last time I updated it, it was a two pager.
I’ve been looking for a new position for a while now and my process is to start with a master resume which is right now about 7 pages. It’s the one I send to recruiters. When replying for a specific position it’s got everything I need and I delete the bits that are not applicable to what I’m responding to. Resumes for specific positions range from 2-4 pages usually.
(a) My government-job resume is five pages, as required (specialized headers & footers, must list every post-college job with relatively-lengthy bulleted summaries for each, and has a separate full-page “summary of experience” section).
(b) My private-sector resume is three pages, though I can trim it down to two if I make it more of a focused resume for a specific employer.
I think this is completely untrue in 2010 for people who have been in the workforce for several years.
The “one page resume” rule, I believe, is still suitable for those just entering the professional work force. But it’s also a rule that’s been over-applied, as people have come to think of it as a rule for ALL resumes. IMHO, a more helpful casting of the rule would be “the first page of your resume should well summarize what you can do”.
And there will always be stories of the harried HR folk who “have to weed through 1,000 resumes in a single day” and who “throw out all of them over one page to shorten the stack” and so on. But 99 out of 100 hirers aren’t doing that – the vast majority CAN take the time to read that second page if they’re pulled in by what’s on the first page. Yes, many of them really can take the time to do that.
I was told keep a resume at 1 page max always. Considering the amount of people applying now, I’ve heard it emphasized more. Jobs listed should be within the past five years or the previous job before your last one (if you stay on it for years). Anything you may have learned from job prior to that could be listed as skills.
Anything beyond that or the 7 pages you mention is a curriculum vitae (CV). Many people consider it the same as a resume, but usually it’s longer. A resume is a summary while a CV is an elaboration.
I did a lot of contract work. I would bunch them under contract work and give company names and a general note about duties since they were all engineering jobs with similar duties. Breaking them down would have been repetitive anyway.
I might say 1979 to 1989
Oversaw design and built of special machines for these companies. Then list them.
It was enough for people in the industry to see the companies. They pretty well knew what they made and did not need me to tell them.
I got mine down to 2 that way.
This is probably highly dependent on the field you’re aiming to enter. Also, might be a more useful tactic if you know in advance that your application is part of a huge “cattle call”.
If you’ve been in the industry for 20 years, a one-page resume is unrealistic. My career is almost that long, but with only four employers, and it’s nearly two pages.
The key for you, it sounds like, is consolidate. If you did the same or similar jobs for a bunch of different employers, you can list the description/accomplishments and then list all the employers together you did it for, instead of listing each job individually.
I have two versions of the resume covering the last 20+ years: the “damn I’m good” version is two pages, and the “don’t hate me because I’m overqualified” version is one page.
I currently only have two resumes. Both are “proposal” resumes used by my company for bidding on projects. One is a one page summary thing that they can use to pull in my three most relevant or recent projects. And the other one is more of a complete rundown of the last 20 years. (though I’ve heard you really only have to go back 10).
If I were looking for a job, I would likely have three resumes. Each of them would likely have only 2 pages. One would be for looking for work in my primary field and it’s the longest amount of time, so would probably be pretty full and I’d have to trim or leave stuff out.
The second would be my secondary job in the fitness industry, I have 12 solid years at the same place on that one, and interim work for the 10 years previous. I’d probably be able to keep that one to one page.
Last would be my interim work resume with admin type skills and jobs listed, I’d probably be able to keep that one to one page as well.
There’s the ones made following the EU’s official format, which are two pages. This has been achieved my scrunching up my jobs: instead of individual entries for each job, those which were similar get grouped up. The format itself has two columns: the left column is the paragraph titles. The right hand side for one of the groups might be something like:
October 2001 - current
SAP Implementer, SAP Consultant, SAP Core Team Member, SAP Tier2 Support
[Description of the work]
Sector (company), sector (companies), sector (company)
I have one of those for “complete resume” and one for “translation”.
The other one is for consulting jobs and, as is the custom in those, you s-p-e-l-l everything out in case the person reading it has a keyword-based brain and/or doesn’t know that “QM” stands for “Quality Management”, and for those with the mental checklists who don’t realize that you did write courses and/or manuals in each and every job listed unless you do list it in each and every job individually. You know, the same kind of person who, after going over the long version of that sample paragraph, asks “are you familiar with the ERP SAP?” No, honey, never heard of it… As of last count, the one I normally use for this is 7 pages long; I was asked for a “complete resume” in that format once and it clocked in at 11 (it was several consulting projects ago).
Spanish doesn’t have a language differentiation between “CV” and “resume” (although I don’t list publications in any of mine), but neither do the UK-based headhunters I speak with.
My CV is 4 pages. In applying for next year’s internship, I used the info in my CV to construct a 2-page resume. It’s harder than I thought it would be. What the prospective employer will consider relevant experience is not always immediately obvious.
I’m in academia, so I do the full academic CV for most things, and it increases in length fairly often. I think it’s at 3-4 pages now, but might be 4-5. Only the first couple of pages are education and experience - the rest is publications, presentations and service. I have occasionally applied for positions that want a resume, and that tends to run about 2 pages.
The one page rule is a bad rule, generally - if the information on your resume is relevant to the job you are applying for, it doesn’t matter if it runs more than a page (I’ve served on search committees in academia, and quite honestly, the thing that matters with the first run through on those is whether I can tell that you meet the minimum requirements. If I can’t tell from the CV/resume and cover letter, you go in the “does not meet” pile).
I hire mid-level IT people. I don’t mind if a resume is more than one page, if the information is orderly and easy to digest. A one-pager with spelling mistakes or an e-mail address that reads lovemonkey @hotmail.com is worse than a 4-page, clearly written resume.
That being said, if the resume is long, I find myself speed-reading. It’s my bad habit, but for every job posted I see hundreds of resumes.
I haven’t updated my resume in ages - I’ve been in my current position for more that twenty years*. I would probably have to go to three pages, as I’ve accumulated quite a bit of history with our national association that will take up the better part of a page - offices, chairmanships, etc.
And built my department up from nothing to quite a bit - quadrupled in size and budgets, etc.