How Long Should Your Resume Be?


by Judi Perkins - Date: 2007-03-18 - Word Count: 595 Share This!

To each job seeker who has struggled to cram his resume onto one page: I hereby give you permission to exceed that limit. The "one page" caveat is outdated and unnecessary….unless of course you don't have enough experience or accolades to spill onto a second page, in which case one page is sufficient. On the other hand, resumes of senior executives can be - and often should be - 3, 4 or 5 pages to sufficiently convey the depth of their experience and skills, both tangible and intangible.

Then how long should a resume be? Remember it's a brochure, and it's selling you as the product. So it needs to be long enough to tell what you've done, sell what you can do, and be inviting to the eye. It needs to be tightly written with bulleted accomplishments and not bore the reader with unnecessary details. Information needs to be distinct and easily located. Don't leave out relevant information or squish things together, especially because you fear your resume is too long. Somewhere in there is the length of your resume.

Some of the worst sins candidates use to save space and keep their resume to a perceived proper length are block paragraphs or a microscopic font. Both are immediate migraine inducers that land your resume in the trashcan. You need that white space in there, no matter how much it increases the length.

The place you don't want to scrimp is the section before your employment history. Your profile/objective/summary is the most important part of your resume and determines if the rest of it is read, skimmed, or ignored. Even though it's written in sentence fragments, focus on your talents, skills and what you bring to the table. It might vary in length and wording depending on what you're going for and how extensive your professional background is.

The further back you go, the less detailed you need to be depending on how your past relates to what you're seeking. Let's say your first job out of school was a retail sales clerk in a local boutique, working on commission. Eventually you became the top salesperson. Soon you were promoted to assistant manager, then manager. Now 25 years later you're a Regional Vice President for a department store chain. As you grow in age and experience, the sales contest details become "consistently outsold other sales people." The two separate management titles become one bulleted accomplishment.

Other factors that concern the length:

List your computer skills together after your employment history. Don't detail them for each place of employment Recent and applicable continuing education should be listed, but don't bother with those that aren't business related or are irrelevant to your goal. The last page should be long enough to fill the top third. If what spills over is just a few lines, make some cuts and drop the last skimpy page. Any resume more than one page needs to be named and numbered in the upper right-hand corner: McWillis, page 2 of 3

Your resume should be concisely written without sacrificing detail or depth, and it needs to be laid out so that the reader is invited to read it. The words must reflect you - don't pull generic phrases from resume templates to simplify an odious task. Put serious thought into it. This isn't a document you should just whip off in nothing flat simply to be done with it.

Recruiters screen in, not out. But hiring authorities do the opposite. If your experience looks applicable to a recruiter's search but your resume is appalling, recruiters will call you anyway. Companies won't.


Related Tags: resume, career, interview, long, pages, length, job change

Prior to starting her firm, VisionQuest, Judi Perkins was a search consultant for 25 years in both the contingency and retained market, including a short stint in the temporary and local permanent placement markets. She has owned her own firm and successfully assisted numerous repeat clients in hiring all levels of management. To sign up for her newsletter and learn thousands of powerful concepts to find your perfect job go to http://www.findtheperfectjob.com

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