There are exceptions (IT, upper-level management), but 98% of the jobs out there do not fit this description. If you can’t sum up a job in 5 lines, your resume is going in the round file cabinet.
Since the OP is asking for advice, this is probably better suited for IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
My job right now is to find resumes, call parties to see if they’re interested, and pass on that info. Here’s what i find the most important:
Length of the document doesn’t matter. It’s length of what I read. That means to make it broken out with bullets, hyphens, indents, etc. So when I count up how much experience you have in fast food or whatever, I can find that easily. When I need to look to see if you have a degree, I can find that easily. To tell you the truth, I don’t even read the paragraphs of info until the third go-round.
So my advice to to make it last long as you need to, but break it out so that the relevant parts (years experience, education, position) are clearly outlined and the extra stuff (“Job Duties: Planned scheduling meetings for higher executives and clients…”) can be easily skimmed over. Bury the unimportant parts and unbury the important parts.
If you do that, your resume will contain 3 pages of information but to me, the recruiter, it will feel like only half a page.
ETA: Avoid paragraphs in the must-read parts. I’m looking at a resume now that says “Overview: With over six years of experience in ______ field, I have a reputation for quality…blah blah blah.” What it should say is
Overview:
6 years in __________
Six Sigma certification
B.A. in Electrical Engineering, NYU 2008.
See how much easier that is to read? It’s 4 lines instead of 1, but it doesn’t feel like it, does it?
Don’t make a resume a catalog of your skills. It should be as short as possible. Resumes should go back ten years. And don’t get stuck into any single format. None is right and none is wrong. You may feel a detailed resume is required for that job, than do it. But the next job change the format.
Basically people reading resumes are going to skim them for key things in that job. Ask yourself what things in that job would YOU look for. Then only highlight those things in your skills sections. If it’s online, it’s worse, 'cause many people simple to a CTRL+F and look for keywords that way.
If you really want to try something do an experiement, make up a resume with a friends name and phone number and make it different from yours, then send it at the same time as you do yours. See if you get the call and he doesn’t or vice versa.
[jerk voice]What is this, the Flintstones? You guys still sort resumes by hand?[/jerk voice]
More and more companies have resume systems. The resume is scanned in or uploaded and the system extracts key-words. Then resumes are matched to job openings automatically using the key-words, based on the the key-words in the job requirements.
Based on this, a different resume writing strategy can be considered. The one page “advertisement” style is not going to have as much raw data to extract and format into key-words. So, a more comprehensive skills and experience listing will end up with more hits.
Just something to consider…
But the resume system doesn’t do actual hiring. So while having the right keywords in your seven page resume might get it through the computer system to HR or the hiring department, if page 1 isn’t a detailed explanation of how you separated the firmament from the waters, the person reading at that level it is going to toss it. (And then bitch to their co-workers about the nutty keyword-based resume system.)
I’ve been in my field for 10 years now, and my resume is 2 pages. But 2 years? Nope, stick to one page.
I like the idea of 10+ years of experience, go to 2 pages. Never go over 2 pages, however. This strikes me as a good rule of thumb.
I’m in the U.S.
If don’t disagree with your conditional (although the bitching part sounds a little like horse riders complaining about those newfangled au-to-mo-biles). I’m just suggesting the one-page “highlights” version will never make it to the HR person in this scenario.
Was this guy a biologist? They seem to have papers with 20 authors each. 45 pages, 6 papers per page, that’s 270 papers which is kind of a lot and implies that most are either not the real work of the applicant or incredibly trivial.
And for the OP - I generally have no problem with multi-page resumes, but padding by including a job description doesn’t sound like a good reason for one. You should be able to say what you did in a line or two, unless you did something unusual and extraordinary. A resume should be long enough and no longer - and it sounds like for you 1 page is long enough.
Unless you are in an academic field and doing research or writing papers, it doesn’t make sense to have a resumé of more than one page or to call it a c.v. (which means curriculum vitae and generally requires a list of publications).
There’s no reason for you to run past one page unless:
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You have a huge font and extreme spacing - try to reign in your formatting there
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You have had ridiculous job turn over - you generally don’t want to advertise this unless it’s a series of promotions within one job. You don’t have to list every job you ever had. List the most recent, and the most relevant.
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You are trying to list long descriptions for each job - yeah you want to show off, but you don’t have to have the same long list of responsibilities repeated for each job. Generally you can just list your title. If you want people to know more details, just list the specifics in the most recent job, or include this info in a separate section such as skills/experience or better yet…
Although the resumé itself should only be one page, it should come with a one page cover letter. This is really the meat of things that is going to tell them what you really want them to know about you, catered to each job you are applying for. The resumé is really just the footnotes/bibliography to your cover letter.