Resume Length
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Does anyone have advice on the "successful" length of a resume - one page or two? The reason I ask is that my brother-in-law (who is an Accountant/CPA) was submitting a "two-pager" with limited success. He cut it to one-page and his phone is ringing off the hook. The point being it appears the "screeners" were losing interest after the first page.
Tis a classic question indeed: does size matter? My advice is leave it as long as it naturally is then accept and embrace its size.
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What I've heard is that a resume should generally be one page, though up to two pages seems pretty widely accepted. I think the key is to put the important information on that first page. You want the employer to see something right from the start that peaks their interest and keeps them reading. In the US, a CV tends to be much longer...I've seen CV's at 10+ pages. But, generally, CV's would only be used after an initial resume had been looked at. If a two-pager wasn't working for him, then either he was putting the "goodies" at the end, or he wasn't being concise enough.
Mine is eight pages - a result of having 30 years of experience in the business. BTW, this doesn't include any job I've had that is not directly related to programming with the exception of my stint in the Navy. My list of skills is two pages long.
.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001 -
Does anyone have advice on the "successful" length of a resume - one page or two? The reason I ask is that my brother-in-law (who is an Accountant/CPA) was submitting a "two-pager" with limited success. He cut it to one-page and his phone is ringing off the hook. The point being it appears the "screeners" were losing interest after the first page.
A friend told me at his place of employment "Jesus Christ himself could not get a job here if his resume was over one page." Another told me his sister worked HR and pitched resumes over one page, printed on colored or fancy paper, had non-standard fonts (anything other than Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman) before she would even read the contents. So trying to make that resume that would stand out was like the tallest blade of grass, the first to be cut. FYI
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11
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Interesting, I toss one page resumes. If you don't have enough experience to fill more than once page, I'm not interested. Then again, in the US the resume and CV are one and the same.
I think that what both of you practice doesn't have to do anything with reality or some meaningful criteria - just you are aware (consciously or subconsciously) of your position and translate that into being subjective jerks deciding on people's fate however you see fit.
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I can't remember who said it originally but it seems to me that "You might be in the gutter, but you are looking up at the stars." Incidentally star is not a euphemism. :)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Oscar Wilde => http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26036.html[^]
Thanks. I could have looked it up, but couldn't be bothered. :)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Thanks. I could have looked it up, but couldn't be bothered. :)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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I think that what both of you practice doesn't have to do anything with reality or some meaningful criteria - just you are aware (consciously or subconsciously) of your position and translate that into being subjective jerks deciding on people's fate however you see fit.
Not at all. We have specific needs and most the people who apply for the few open positions we've had (at my current and previous companies) simply aren't qualified. Many are smart, even brilliant, but won't fit our needs. For example, the last hire we did, my team lead and I needed someone who could work from the driver level up to the non-UI level. That's a hard job to fill. Just because someone has C++ experience doesn't mean they know how to write drivers, whether in the strict Win32 sense or a general, hardware interface sense. We ended up getting resumes and doing interviews with people across the spectrum. We interviewed one guy who's resume was a fit; he claimed to have had embedded system and multi-threaded experience, yet he couldn't answer the most rudimentary questions about synchronization objects. Our conclusion was that he had worked on an embedded system, but it had a primitive OS that used a combination of a giant polling loop and interrupts. We got dozens of resumes that had nothing do to with out requirements; people who had only .NET experience, people who had tons of other experience, but who hadn't used C or C++ in years. Twenty-two years ago, I send a resume to a company. They decided to not call me back since it looked like I'd tailored my resume to an ad in the LA Times. Only problem being that my resume was postmarked two days before that ad ran. I eventually got hired and was shown a fraction of the other resumes they'd gotten. One was one page with the only education being high school and the work experience being fast food; the submitter had written "I heard computers are a good field to get into." That aside, they got hundreds of resumes and had to winnow them down somehow; chucking badly written and incomplete resumes was a quick way to get to a reasonable stack. As for spelling being meaningful; it is. Do you really want an illiterate person working for you? Do you want an employee who is so lazy, they won't even proof read their own resume? Or go to someone else for help? If I send my resume to a business that does only Linux development, a quick glance of my resume should see it thrown in the trash since it's all about Windows programming. And that's the final point; I know that to get a job, I have to ensure my resume is the best it can be. (I know I've lost job opportunities because hiring managers didn't like my resume or something about it. That's life.)
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When I hire people this is what happens: 1- any resume longer than 1 page -> trash bin. 2- any remaining resumes with spelling/grammar errors -> trash bin. A resume is not a static document and it's not a CV. It should be tuned for the job application in question. I don't want to read about your complete work history, just what's relevant to the job applied for. If I'm interested you'll get a job interview and a request for a CV. Bring your CV to the interview and be prepared to discuss it. The purpose of a resume is to convince someone to interview you. The purpose of an interview is to convince someone to hire you. Also, you should use the same wording in your resume that is in the job posting. In this day and age many big companies simply have HR monkeys (or computers) scan through the resume looking for the key words.
-Sean ---- Fire Nuts
Sean Cundiff wrote:
any resume longer than 1 page -> trash bin.
This seems pretty stupid to me. Throwing away candidates because their resumé are longer than one page might just miss you the opportunity to hire a great employee. I'd say it shouldn't matter the number of pages a resume has. It should matter what's on the first page. If you like what you see on the first page you might keep reading or not. If you don't care about the rest, no problem, but shouldn't be a reason disqualify a candidate
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Sean Cundiff wrote:
any resume longer than 1 page -> trash bin.
This seems pretty stupid to me. Throwing away candidates because their resumé are longer than one page might just miss you the opportunity to hire a great employee. I'd say it shouldn't matter the number of pages a resume has. It should matter what's on the first page. If you like what you see on the first page you might keep reading or not. If you don't care about the rest, no problem, but shouldn't be a reason disqualify a candidate
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When you only have time to read 10 of the 100 resumes you got for a job opening arbitrary rules for tossing large numbers of them are inevitable.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
Maybe in that case, but not as a general rule.
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Does anyone have advice on the "successful" length of a resume - one page or two? The reason I ask is that my brother-in-law (who is an Accountant/CPA) was submitting a "two-pager" with limited success. He cut it to one-page and his phone is ringing off the hook. The point being it appears the "screeners" were losing interest after the first page.
I think we need to combine both features If the reviewer of the resume needs to read one paper with few lines that focuses only on the main skills and expertise, he/she shall find that page. And if he/she is interested in more details he shall find it too So, I present this idea I hope it helps
foreach(Minute m in MyLife) myExperience++;
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For engineers, the key is to have the most pertinent information up front. The first half of the first page should list years of experience and KEY skills. After that, use the pages you need to list your experience. If that takes three pages, so be it. People hiring engineers are generally looking for specific skills and the more evidence they have of that, the better. They're also looking for familiar, such as companies they also worked for. I've debated trimming my resume down to two pages, but my first job usually elicits some comments (Apple II game programming using 6502 Assembly) and I don't want to remove my work period at Novell on since just about everyone where I live has worked there or knows someone who has. Still I'm trying to think of a creative way to do some major edits. For the record, unless I'm deliberately interviewing a newbie, I'll chuck one page resumes. I also ignore cover letters and an "Objective" line since both are usually just bullshit filler. Again, the single biggest mistake I've seen over the years is not listing[, or making clear] the [key] languages and technologies you know [and use]. (I work only on Windows and only for "Windows Houses"; it's annoying to interview someone who hates Microsoft so much he/she won't use any of their tools or even Windows! Sorry, but if you want to write Windows apps, I insist you understand Windows fairly well [and if I wrote Mac apps, I'd insist you knew the Mac fairly well]. On top of that, if you don't use Visual Studio and know how to use it well, I don't want to hire you.)
modified on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 6:40 PM
New Idea for CV http://muhammadgouda.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-idea-for-cv.html[^]
foreach(Minute m in MyLife) myExperience++;
modified on Thursday, April 22, 2010 3:23 AM
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if you have a lot of solid experience, there is no limit. if you're just padding it with bullshit, 1 page will do. resume screeners can tell bullshit from solid experience, so don't bother padding it just to make it longer. but don't trim all the relevant and important details just to make it shorter. it needs to be exactly long enough to describe what you've done, in enough detail that a screener can properly evaluate you, without getting fluffy.
New Idea for CV http://muhammadgouda.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-idea-for-cv.html[^]
foreach(Minute m in MyLife) myExperience++;
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Does anyone have advice on the "successful" length of a resume - one page or two? The reason I ask is that my brother-in-law (who is an Accountant/CPA) was submitting a "two-pager" with limited success. He cut it to one-page and his phone is ringing off the hook. The point being it appears the "screeners" were losing interest after the first page.
All my resumes are submitted electronically. I use the first page as a one page resume and the rest as a detailed description going back several pages deep. Unfortunately, in the world of keyword processing and stupid HR a 1 page resume does not even close to cut it in I.T.. I have tried the one and two pagers before and constantly got the exact same response, "What I really want is a lot more detail about your past projects so I can see what you have done" There is no right answer because every hiring manager is different, and worse, every H.R. chick who previews the resumes before the hiring manager is different, and if you go through a recruiter they are different as well. No matter what you do it is wrong. Be lucky, be honest, and call. (Even if they say no calls)
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
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Not at all. We have specific needs and most the people who apply for the few open positions we've had (at my current and previous companies) simply aren't qualified. Many are smart, even brilliant, but won't fit our needs. For example, the last hire we did, my team lead and I needed someone who could work from the driver level up to the non-UI level. That's a hard job to fill. Just because someone has C++ experience doesn't mean they know how to write drivers, whether in the strict Win32 sense or a general, hardware interface sense. We ended up getting resumes and doing interviews with people across the spectrum. We interviewed one guy who's resume was a fit; he claimed to have had embedded system and multi-threaded experience, yet he couldn't answer the most rudimentary questions about synchronization objects. Our conclusion was that he had worked on an embedded system, but it had a primitive OS that used a combination of a giant polling loop and interrupts. We got dozens of resumes that had nothing do to with out requirements; people who had only .NET experience, people who had tons of other experience, but who hadn't used C or C++ in years. Twenty-two years ago, I send a resume to a company. They decided to not call me back since it looked like I'd tailored my resume to an ad in the LA Times. Only problem being that my resume was postmarked two days before that ad ran. I eventually got hired and was shown a fraction of the other resumes they'd gotten. One was one page with the only education being high school and the work experience being fast food; the submitter had written "I heard computers are a good field to get into." That aside, they got hundreds of resumes and had to winnow them down somehow; chucking badly written and incomplete resumes was a quick way to get to a reasonable stack. As for spelling being meaningful; it is. Do you really want an illiterate person working for you? Do you want an employee who is so lazy, they won't even proof read their own resume? Or go to someone else for help? If I send my resume to a business that does only Linux development, a quick glance of my resume should see it thrown in the trash since it's all about Windows programming. And that's the final point; I know that to get a job, I have to ensure my resume is the best it can be. (I know I've lost job opportunities because hiring managers didn't like my resume or something about it. That's life.)
I agree with everything you've written, especially with ending sentence in parenthesis, because that was my point. Most hiring managers have excuses rather than criteria because excuses are more effective in filtering list of candidates and making their jobs easier. If you establish rock-solid criteria and stick to it, you need to go through extensive testing - is person illiterate, or English is his second language? Or as you illustrated - is resume tailored to an ad or guy is actually perfect fit?
