I am sending out my resume for fast food restaurant management. Or, some hospitality industry stuff. I only have two years in the ff biz. Now, what I need to know is, is it still proper to use a one page resume, or can one spread it into a two pager? It’s basically the 2 years of ff that would be using up the space. It seems excessive, but, I checked the job description for one job, and tried to steal it for my resume, but that job alone would take up two pages.
In a related question, for something like ff management, etc… would calling my resume a CV be a bit over their heads? I don’t mind coming across as pompous and pretentious, because that’s me, but I would be horrified to put CV on it, and they start shaking or scratching their heads, because I wasn’t smart enough to delete some sort of typo and write in resume!
When in doubt, one page. Most people whose job it is to sift through resumes make personal judgment calls about a person based on the resume: it’s really the first, and most concrete, impression you’ll make. Increased effort to process a resume = increased likelihood of tossing it. Especially for the kind of work you’re seeking. So in answer to you question, yeah don’t call it a CV.
If you’re a published researcher looking for a position as the head cardiologist at a major teaching hospital, then you call it a CV and pad that sucker out, the more pages the better. But for most real-world jobs, a single page resume–not CV–is what they’re looking for. And do NOT clip a picture to it, no matter how cute you think you are. Do NOT do this.
You are advertising yourself. Think about those adverts for medicines you sometimes see in magazines that take up two pages and are full of tiny print. Do you read that? No, you skip to the next page.
Now on the next page is a intriguing ad with a phrase that pulls you in immediately. You pause briefly on that page to find out what they’re selling. Sure, you don’t stay long but you don’t need to, you get everything you need in that first impression.
People don’t want to have to dig through your resume like a senior thesis, they want to know what you have that will help their company. Brevity is preferred.
I think it depends where you are- here in Australia, a one-page resume would likely get your application binned because HR would look at it and say “Wow, they haven’t done much and we don’t know if they meet the skills we’re looking for”.
I’d say that with two years of relevant experience you’d be wise to limit it as much as you can. That’s not true for everyone, of course, mine, for example now spans six pages.
But for where you are I’d boil it down to one page and be prepared to go into more detail during the interview, should it happen.
My mate was in charge of assessing applications for well-paid jobs at his company.
He said that they usually got over a hundred applications for each post advertised.
His first move was to throw out any applications that:
were handwritten
had typing errors
were badly laid out
didn’t refer to qualities / qualifications mentioned in the ad
were over one page
His reasoning was that if you can’t take the time to summarise and present a perfect CV, then there are better candidates.
You sound young. Don’t bother with a two-page resume if you don’t have two pages worth of experience, otherwise you’re just padding.
And gee Martini Enfield and glee, that makes me shudder. It’s nice to see that no matter how hard I try, my resume is still going to get binned for conflicting and arbitrary reasons.
My position is that HR don’t want to read more than a 1 page resume, based on wanting precis skills and having lots of applications to wade through.
If you have special abilities for a particular job, why not include a covering letter?
I don’t like it either, but when I was having to try and find suitable employees, handwritten, badly typed, or one-page resumes generally went in the “No” pile.
Incidentally, I didn’t recall seeing any single-page resumes. 2 pages were the minimum, plus- ideally- a cover letter.
The rule of thumb I’ve heard in my industry is–if you’re sending your resume straight to HR, one page is safer. If you’re sending it to a contact you have, include all your relevant experience, no matter the length. The idea is the HR person is simply going to look for a few key words and then bin it or pass it on. Your contact will want to see everything you’ve got, so when they take your resume to their supervisor they will have what they need to sell you.
Sending a resume cold to HR is always a long shot. It’s always much better to know a friend or a friend of a friend to get your resume directly to the person who will ultimately be making the hiring decision. If they like you, what the paper-sorter in HR thinks is moot.
It may not be over their heads, but it would be frankly silly, and basically wrong for the field you’re applying for.
At least in the US, a CV is meant to be longer than a resume - at least 2 pages, and is typically used for academic, research, or scientific positions. CV and resume aren’t simply two words for the same thing.
Almost all of the resumes I get nowadays are two pages. Some are two pages even when they have to repeat themselves and pad the material.
But I’m not really concerned with page count*. When I’m judging resumes (which I’m doing now; we’ll be doing interviews next week), I want to see:
Clear layout. Some whitespace is good, even if carries you into two pages. I don’t want to see one page of crammed together microprint. The important thing is that you’ve clearly indicated which things are the important things. Use bolding, headers, lists, indentation, etc. to clearly focus my eye on what you want me to see.
Clear relation to the job. If you’re applying for my bookkeeping position, do not describe, in detail, your last four positions as a barista.
Good spelling and grammar on the resume, cover letter and/or e-mail. I’ll forgive one mistake.
Either give me a skill-based resume OR a jobs-based resume, but not both. If you list all of your skills and experience in a skills section and then list all of your skills and experience in the jobs section, I’m going to toss it out.
Be specific. “I managed payroll” means little to me. Do you mean that you called ADP to report employee hours or that employees reported their hours to you and you calculated payroll and prepared the checks?
*I should put a caveat in regards to saying I don’t care about page count. More than two pages, and it’s almost impossible for you to manage all five of the criteria I listed.
Not a clinical study or anything, but at least one survey conducted by a resume writing professional seems to indicate that the one page rule is no longer generally in effect.
That’s basically collated anecdotes rather than data, but that’s what we’ve got in this thread in general already.
One caveat: I wonder how many of the people who say “resume should be as long as necessary to show relevant skills” and things like that actually simply chunk any resume longer than one page, rationalizing it after the fact as “longer than necessary.”
I’ve always heard that if you are trying to summarize less than 10 years experience, you limit your resume to one page. If you are summarizing more than 10 years experience, use two (and no more than two) pages.
My last resume summarized my 18 years in the workforce and was two pages long. I got job offers for every job I applied for using it. Sometimes it was reviewed first by HR, sometimes just by my contact.
If you are writing a CV for an academic or research position, the sky’s the limit. I’ve seen a 50-page CV of which 45 pages was the guy’s publication list. (Frankly, though, I thought it was more than a little over-the-top, and the guy turned out to be a complete loon. Thankfully, we did not hire him.)