Why is it important to have a shorter résumé?

http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/11/07/10pages/

by fecak • 13 years ago

34 71 13 years ago

jmscharff2• 13 years ago

I think that a single page resume especially in a technical field is difficult if you want to have projects, jobs, schooling etc all included. A two page resume I would say is the maximum size a 5 page resume would be way too long and probably has a lot of extra fluff (unless you are including publications those take up a lot of space)

EliRivers• 13 years ago

It is difficult, but it seems to be appreciated. Whilst I'm only one data point, the last time I was looking for work fully half of interviewers commented favourably (and even thanked me) on the fact that my CV was a single side of A4; I tell myself that if I can't convince someone in a single side of A4 that I'm worth interviewing, extra pages will only make things worse. It forces me to really think about which of my skills and experience will support my application.

JoshTriplett3• 13 years ago

I have a two-page resume, but it's split such that the first page is what potential interviewers will need to read and the second page is the stuff only HR's high-pass filters will care about.

rayiner• 13 years ago

Opinions on this subject obviously differ. My take is this: for most people (e.g. outside of academia), a resume isn't a shipping manifest. It's a piece of persuasive writing. The question isn't, "is one page enough to describe everything I've done" but rather "is one page enough to convince some hiring authority that I'm worth calling back?"

My dad does a lot of hiring. He says he spends about a couple of minutes on each resume that crosses his desk (he usually evaluates hundreds for any given position). That amount of time is enough to give one page due consideration, two pages an adequate read, but not to do anything more than skim through a 3+ page resume. Especially a dense one.

I think part of the problem is that a lot of the classic resume guidelines (chronological ordering) are not conducive to building a resume that highlights the relevant parts of someone's experience.

fecak12• 13 years ago

These are good points. Would you rather write a document that is one page and will be viewed carefully, or a 3 page document that will be scanned? It seems a pretty easy decision, but generally screeners will want to spend the same amount of time viewing every resume and are unlikely to give a candidate who provides 6 pages three times the amount of viewing as they would someone who writes 2 pages.

seiji• 13 years ago

Random thoughts:

Projects: If they are open to the public, link to them. Show, don't tell. If they aren't public, then they go under the job history section as brief descriptions.

Schooling: One line, degrees and years separated by semicolons. If your last schooling was over eight years ago, drop any non-national-level honors/awards.

Start dropping details of jobs that ended over five years ago. They get two or three lines only. More recent jobs can have 5 to 8 lines of details each.

A resume is a conversation starter, not the conversation.

fecak12• 13 years ago

Really sound advice here. Let the code talk for you when possible and keeping the education short will eliminate several lines for some. Older engineers that list jobs from 20+ years ago often provide too much unnecessary detail on those jobs where a single line may suffice for irrelevant experience.

bronbron2• 13 years ago

I think that a single page resume especially in a technical field is difficult if you want to have projects, jobs, schooling etc all included.

Not really - I think we have a tendency to, as the article notes, want to list every single thing just incase they find it relevant. They probably won't, and it's probably unimportant to the position.

To me, having a multi-page resume is usually an indicator that you're mass-applying (which you should, no doubt) and can't be bothered to tailor the resume to the position you're applying for (which is bad).

Tzunamitom• 13 years ago

I suffered from this problem until I found myself in a hiring manager position where I had the opportunity to review a bulk load of CVs from hopeful candidates applying for a job that I had the power to grant them.

If this is something you suffer from, I suggest you ask your friends to all send you their CVs and spend a few hours going through them as if you were preparing to interview them...

efsavage• 13 years ago

$acceptablePageLength = ($yearsExperience / 10) + 1;

jimm• 13 years ago

By this formula, I can have four pages. My resume is four pages plus four lines that spill over onto the fifth page. If your formula handled floating point instead of integers, I'd be fine.

angersock• 13 years ago

If I received your resume and the last page was literally cut to just contain those four lines, I'd certainly remember it. :)

bdesimone• 13 years ago

Unless you are published, a page is enough. Seriously.

lucb1e5• 13 years ago

I was taught in school and recommended by parents to include everything from middle school education to current employment. Combine that with all skills, programming languages and projects I've worked on, and I actually have a hard time fitting it all on 2 pages.

Care to elaborate why you think "one page ought to be enough for everyone"? Seriously.

fecak12• 13 years ago

Middle school education? What country did you hear this in? That is definitely not the case in the US, and I'd venture to guess that would be customary only in countries where a middle school education is generally the highest level obtained.

ig12• 13 years ago

It's important to remember that the "x pages" rule of thumb is a hang-over from when we had paper resumes.

Current reading behaviour is somewhat different and tends towards scanning/skipping because the breaks between pages are much less significant with a resume on screen.

bronbron2• 13 years ago

I dunno, I (and I would suspect many others) have the same tendency when reading PDFs - if it's more than 1 page, I skim to the end then go back up, much like I would on a paper document.

Are you citing something or just generalizing from what you've seen?

ig12• 13 years ago

I've not seen a paper directly comparing the two, but if you look at resume correlation studies (comparing attributes of CV to acceptance/rejection rates), resume length generally has a stronger correlation to outcome in paper resume studies than electronic resume studies.

(there may be other factors at play though, as candidates who submit paper resumes are obviously different from candidates who submit electronic resumes; in addition most of the paper resume studies are now historical (pre-2000) so there may also be a time factor involved)

mech4bg3• 13 years ago

I still read a resume page by page. Maybe it's different if it's displayed as a web page, but most are still in page form in a PDF.

Also, the '1 page' rule of thumb is not a hangover, it's a great rule - one physical page happens a good amount of space to show your experience, but not have too much information that it can't all be read quickly. It's a positive limitation.

imperialWicket• 13 years ago

This won't work for everyone or for every position, but I've converted to something more like:

Github | Blog | Project sites | etc.

Resume available upon request.

If a company actually needs a resume for whatever reason, I tend to side with the OP. If you send more than one page (with reasonable formatting) then you are just sending over data that will likely be ignored.

__mp2• 13 years ago

I usually list HTML and CSS as office skills next to Microsoft Office and LaTeX ;) http://i.imgur.com/1Yx5PY1.png (I haven't updated this CV in a while and I think I should downgrade my Java and Eiffel experience again since I haven't written any Java and Eiffel code in a while)

For bonus points: Can you guess the university?

waylandsmithers• 13 years ago

I like the way that looks. What font did you use for the headings? Body text looks like Century?

__mp2• 13 years ago

The CV was created in LaTeX using a modified moderncv template: (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/modernc... )

As for the font in the section titles: I don't know. For the body it uses the lmodern font (http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/lmodern/ )

I would have been easier to create the CV in word; but I prefer the font layouting in LaTeX to Word/Pages/Google Docs/etc...

JoshTriplett3• 13 years ago

Looks very nice, both in form and in content. Are you looking right now? :)

adeptus• 13 years ago

On the flip side, nothing ticks me off more than large companies who think they are so desirable (they're not!) that they think they can get away with making you fill out pages of propriatary website application forms and upload your resume into blocks of text that never format properly. When I see that... It immediately turns me off and I walk away. Not interested in conforming to BS.It speaks volumes of how you run your company and intend to treat your employees.

makmanalp3• 13 years ago

The moment a reader realizes that a résumé is more than say two or three pages, negative impressions flow and the reader becomes less inclined to give the document their full attention.

Translation: "I am unable and unwilling to give something a fair judgement."

Another explanation for multi-page résumés is the common use of CVs outside North America, as CVs are often much longer and more detailed than what US companies expect or desire

I wonder if the desires of companies and hiring managers are being conflated.

When CV users in the US start using the more accepted and brief résumé format, the industry will be better off as a whole.

Really? Why? Better off how?

CV formats often used by foreign developers are more likely to list minute details of each technical environment. This includes languages, operating systems, IDE’s, frameworks and libraries, app servers, databases, methodologies, and build tools, sometimes complete with version and release numbers. The sheer volume of this data can be quite cumbersome for contractors and consultants who work for several clients in a year, which is the norm for many new arrivals to the US. This information is rarely a major factor in interview assessments, wastes valuable space, and portrays the writer in a negative light due to a perceived inability to prioritize the minimal importance of this information.

So the pattern I'm seeing here is that hiring managers don't give a shit about your experience as long as the buzzwords match. We knew this already, but I was expecting a thoughtful essay, not a reiteration of this disguised as a proper argument. Of course version numbers, IDEs, etc is way too much, but a one liner is not enough to describe anything useful.

Anyway, I've mostly found that the best way to get hired is to bypass the HR gateway. Go through someone you know, or get introduced. Worst case, introduce yourself: report a bug, submit a pull request to their project, keep offering insightful feedback on their blog. If the team likes you, tough shit. They usually get to overrule anyone. And I've never seen an engineer bitch about having too much information on the resume. It saves me the effort of having to obtain that info during the interview and decide that you weren't a match in the first place. Oops.

Final insight to hiring people: If you are getting too many resume spam to wade through, raise the bar. Add a 10 minute code task. Add a secret keyword in the job description body for them to include in their e-mail, to make sure they read it. Hell, add a silly programmer filter like "send your resume to the base64 decoded version of this text: ....". As long as you don't make it too complicated, all of these things are a minor inconvenience to people who genuinely want to work with you. But they are a major inconvenience for resume spammers.

----------------- edit:

Another point is that with the current hiring process, your resume has two vastly different audiences. HR people and engineers. As a result of this clash of interests, resumes fall in the awkward middle. By bypassing the HR process, you also have the opportunity to write a resume specifically catered towards engineers.

There is always the argument that a resume is a sales pitch, but who are you selling to? I've read tons of one pagers, coming away with nothing conclusive as to whether I should pursue or not. "Worked on implementing payments on an e-commerce site using JSP, JBoss, ..." So what? Were you by yourself or in a team? Did you use preexisting stuff or did you do it from scratch? How big was the site? How did launch go? What kind of process did you guys have? At what stage did you join? Did you lead the project?

If you've had more than 3-4 jobs, a page is not enough. I don't want a slick sales pitch, I want as many details as I can get.

bane5• 13 years ago

So the pattern I'm seeing here is that hiring managers don't give a shit about your experience as long as the buzzwords match. We knew this already, but I was expecting a thoughtful essay, not a reiteration of this disguised as a proper argument.

Having waded through stacks of breathless resumes exactly like they're talking about, I have to agree with the article on this.

A decent developer should be able to get by with whatever environment we put them in front of. Even if it's just notepad and an old version of Perl. Those kinds of very specific details can come out in the interview.

What often happens with non-US persons is that they start to list every conceivable technology that consumed electrons in their office environment hoping one of them is interesting enough to get them a job. It doesn't, it usually gets their resume tossed because it looks like an identical list of enterprise software stacks from the last 300 resumes my recruiter gave me.

base64 decoded version of this tex

Actually that's rather clever. Make them do some kind of basic, but hackerish task to submit. That way you filter for people with at least basic technical computer skills so you don't waste time considering them.

Sae5waip• 13 years ago

Would be nice if it was a task that could be solved faster by programming than by googling.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=base64+online

makmanalp3• 13 years ago

Re: small task, it's kinda like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash when you think about it. :)

fecak12• 13 years ago

Author here. I'm perfectly willing to give something a fair judgment, and although I didn't include this in the article, I'm actually scheduled to speak with the person with the 23 bullet summary and 4 sentences on Google.

The problem is that although I'm still willing to give a fair judgment, the candidate's inability to distill what is important from trivia will give me a negative impression. You're assuming that there is relative content in those additional pages, which there isn't. I can write "I am qualified for the job" 500 times on a sheet of paper, but if I require someone to read the last 499 I've done them a disservice.

Regarding CVs vs a brief resume format, I think the industry will be better off because the use of CVs seems to negatively impact mostly foreign workers who are accustomed to using that format. I still read as much as necessary in order to evaluate a candidate, but I assure you that many hiring managers and recruiters do not.

I agree that surpassing the HR hiring process is much more effective, and I even advocate that method specifically in an entire section of my ebook.

The two audiences is a real issue as you mention, and having ATS systems scanning resumes is another issue and third audience for the resume to cater to.

makmanalp3• 13 years ago

Hey. Thanks for the thoughtful response! Sorry if that was a bit abrasive, but it's a hot topic for me, and I really think it matters.

I totally agree with you in that you shouldn't ever be wasting space. It's disrespectful if you're really not providing anything better in 3 pages that you could have in 1. I'm just frustrated at the immediate dismissal of having more than one page (and I don't mean to single you out, it's everyone).

The goal should be to convey information as densely as possible (i.e. high signal to noise) while also taking care to convey relevant information. If it goes over a page even then, that's fine.

allard• 13 years ago

Opinions differ. I imagine many have an opinion on whether there should be a cover letter or note or not, and how long it should be. But this is rarely stated.

fecak12• 13 years ago

I never want a full 'traditional' cover letter as they always tend to be stiff due to the format ("Dear Hiring Manager" and formality), but I'd like a few sentences with the resume submission that say why you are interested in the job, what caught your eye, and maybe a couple sentences on why you think you'd be a fit.

bane5• 13 years ago

It's funny, I've worked contract jobs that want every tiniest little detail you've ever come across in your resume so they can qualify you against a better labor category. My resume for those positions was a grueling 10 pager.

I keep my resume up to date every couple months, and about once a year go through an overhaul it. In my last overhaul, I got it down to 2 solid pages, which isn't bad for handling almost 20 years of work, a bunch of schooling and some other sundry. I have a couple different versions of the resume as well, depending on what I'm shooting for but generally I follow this.

My last couple jobs I try and include quite a few broad level bullets, especially if the job had lots of variety in it. Editing (cutting out things) is really hard, but nobody wants to read a novel. After that I start to reduce the amount of space I'm willing to consume for a position.

Very old positions are pretty much year:title:company and that's it.

Education is also pretty direct, year, degree, school with GPA in the margin. Nobody really wants to read about all the extra curricular activities, especially if you went to school a long time ago.

Way down at the end of my second page, I stuck some misc: tools, awards, publications that sort of thing. People aren't generally super interested in those things in my field, but it pads out the second page. Just work + Education gives me a decently breeze 1.5 pager.

But editing some of that stuff out was really hard. There's work that I've done years ago that I'm really proud of, but it's just not worth it to have on there anymore eating up lots of space.

Having been a hiring manager, I really care about what you worked on in your last job, why you want this job and if a quick breeze over your work history shows a forward moving progression of increasing responsibility.

I remember reading through some really dreadful 9-13 page resumes during the .com boom where people 2 or 3 years out of high school were listing extensive tables of dozens of very expensive technologies like expert level SGI IRIX.

The consistently worst resumes tend to come from people outside the U.S. So I try to cut them slack, but sometimes you get resumes where you can tell they're just throwing buzz words against the wall to see if it gets them a job and they have no idea what they're talking about.

I worked with another hiring manager who followed a strict policy of tossing any resume with a single spelling or grammar error. It sounds harsh, but her idea was that anybody who couldn't take care enough on their resume wouldn't take care enough of their work. Her company has been wildly successful so there might be something there.

jared314• 13 years ago

and if a quick breeze over your work history shows a forward moving progression of increasing responsibility.

I'm curious on your reasoning behind wanting a forward moving progression. Are you looking for people who want more than what they have? Or, does this represent a "stable" personality to you?

bane5• 13 years ago

Over many years, people just tend to end up in positions of increasing responsibility unless they're really fouling up regularly or have some other limiting factor. It doesn't mean path-to-CEO, but a steady path from jr. dev to sr. dev or VP of engineering or some such is good.

There's exceptions of course, people from academic backgrounds don't progress the same way for example.

But spending 15 years in exactly the same position doing exactly the same job does not encourage me that they're the kind of creative, forward thinking, ambitious person I'd like on my team. Especially engineering types, who should be internally driven to improve things, from code to their jobs to their salary. Business requirements change over time, and a person who can't keep up with that and just wants to do the same job forever ends up becoming dead weight.

Looking at it another way, I always try to hire somebody good enough that they could be my replacement.

fecak12• 13 years ago

After 20 years of work, 2 pages is great. But you're still listing GPA?

Agreed on some of the buzzword inclusion that comes across as blatant pandering. I've also started seeing buzzwords in bold, which hopefully does not become a trend.

bane5• 13 years ago

You'd be surprised at how much weight some companies put on GPA...decades after you went to school.

eevilspock• 13 years ago

This length of your comment is a perfect case in point. I'll bet a lot of readers skimmed or skipped it, and ended up not sure what you are about.

alatkins• 13 years ago

Obligatory Rands link: http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-glimpse-and-a-hook/

fecak12• 13 years ago

Never read that one, thanks for the share.

sebarciszewski• 13 years ago

Single page resumes can be tough to accomplish if you've got a lot of things you want to highlight. Obviously you're trying to get the attention of the person doing the resume sifting, but that's probably where you can have a little more impact with some minor effort into the way your resume looks. Giant boring blocks of text are probably the majority of resumes, but if you can make something that stands out a bit, perhaps you can at least get someone to spend a bit more time looking over your CV.

cletus• 13 years ago

Resumes/CVs (I'm using the terms interchangeably here) serve different purposes. They really need to be catered for that purpose:

1. Looking for work

Your resume should be 2 pages, tops. If Guido van Rossum can have a short resume [1] so can you.

There is an important skill here and that's learning how to reduce what you're saying to the most salient points. This applies to resumes and presentations. This ties in to the oft-quoted Blaise Pascal [2]. As soon as you start writing "Responsible for design and development" you've gone astray.

The key things that should be in your resume shouldn't be your responsibilities (nobody cares) but what you've actually done.

You may think all 10 pages are important but they're not. The person reading it might have a stack of 50 on their desk. Each is probably only going to get 30 seconds of attention (tops) before a large number are culled and a second pass is made.

Some seem to argue that this is the hiring manager's problem and they should have longer attention spans. But the fact is if you can't get your point across quickly there value of extra time spent on a resume diminishes quickly.

Now this all changes in certain job situations, for example contracting with large companies. At such places your resume will go through a filter before it ever sees a hiring manager. That filter is of course the HR department. HR departments, as a general rule, don't have a clue about technology. All they do is look at the job description and look for the appropriate acronyms in your resume.

I once got asked "I see you have 5 years of Java experience, but do you have any J2SE experience?" End result? My resume was updated to say "Java/J2SE - 7 years".

You have to balance this out. Getting past HR just to appear like buzzword nonsense to a hiring manager is winning the battle to lose the war. So there still has to be enough meat.

Another way of culling information is highlighting what's relevant to that position and de-emphasizing (or removing entirely) the irrelevant. If you're applying for a job doing Linux driver development in C and you did 3 years of J2EE 8 years ago, nobody is going to care. Just delete it (for that job). If that creates a gap, reduce that experience to one line.

Tailoring resumes for specific jobs is one skill or idea that many people don't seem to have in my experience. It's OK to have multiple versions of your resume as long as they don't contradict each other.

2. Visa/immigration issues

Different kettle of fish. Here it's a bit like the HR filter case. Immigration officials will look at the job description and look for that experience on your resume. You need to make it simple for them. That can include putting key terms and acronyms in bold (seriously).

3. Freelancing

Probably most relevant is what project you've successfully completed and any references of such you have. Your employment responsibilities become less relevant. So have a line "Worked 3 years for IBM" if you must but no real need to break it down beyond job title.

Links to your work are far more important in this case.

4. Applying for (typically government) contracts.

The HR case on steroids. Government contracts are seemingly decided on the raw weight of supporting documentation. Put in every little detail you can. Or you could do something useful with your life.

[1] http://www.python.org/~guido/Resume.html

[2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Sourced

lucb1e5• 13 years ago

If Guido van Rossum can have a short resume so can you.

Nice one-liner, but actually Guido van Rossum would probably get hired pretty much anywhere. He does not need to stress all his various skills; he is not currently in need of a job.

Not to say that your recommendation of "2 pages, tops" is wrong, I honestly can't say. I just think the Guido van Rossum comparison is a bit unfair ;)

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

If Guido van Rossum can have a short resume so can you.

No, that doesn't work. Guido van Rossum can have a short resume because he has widely-known accomplishments that instantly familiar to almost anyone who he might be interested in working for.

If you haven't done something like inventing Python, you need more words to explain the significance of your past experience.

dredwerker2• 13 years ago

I hate my CV. I have revised it so many times. Its currently 3 pages (25 years experience) and in Australia people have said it needs more detail.

I just have no idea what to add. Anybody got any good sites for CVs?

mech4bg3• 13 years ago

Out of interest, who's telling you it needs more detail?

dredwerker2• 13 years ago

The agents.

tobyjsullivan2• 13 years ago

One page is more than enough. It's important to remember the purpose of a resume.

The purpose of a resume is not to get you a job. The purpose of a resume is to get you an interview.

To expand on that, as I was once told by a helpful professor, "The purpose of a cover letter is to get them to read your resume. The purpose of your resume is to get an interview. Finally, it is the responsibility of your interview to get you the job."

You will never write a resume so good the interview will just be a formality so stop trying. Focus your resume on exactly what it needs to be to get you that interview. And that should be a single page of beautiful, focused, catered content.

mattmanser2• 13 years ago

Having gone through the process recently, this is rubbish.

If you've got 10 years experience 3 pages is perfectly normal and when I tried with a single page cv, kept getting asked if this was just the covering page & can I send my whole CV.

Also as soon as I added a whole load of detail like 'did this, wrote this program, used this tech' to every job, the interview offers started coming like crazy.

fecak12• 13 years ago

3 pages isn't some unforgivable sin by any means, but that is the range where people start to wonder about your ability to prioritize your background. 1-2 pages are always safe, assuming you can say what you need to say.

For 10 years of experience, most resumes I see are probably a full 2 pages, but rarely more. The number of jobs you've had (and choose to list) also is a factor, which is particularly challenging for contractors with multiple gigs.

cdcarter• 13 years ago

If I may ask, are you US based? That seems fully out of line with what I've experienced in every US hiring process I've been through, and totally in line with what I've heard about abroad hiring.

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

This makes me recall the huge deal one of my advisors at University made of little rules at interview lunches. She insisted that we never dare put salt and pepper on our food before tasting it - because interviewers would be watching to see if we were willing to try new things. What utter garbage. When I go over a resume or interview someone, I'm just doing a candidate assessment of their experience and work ethic. If that's 1 page or 3, or if they assume they like their food salty, I don't really care. I think the article itself gives some good suggestions, but when I come across comments about a page being a hard limit I just don't understand it. I assume I would never want to work for people who judge on such arbitrary and irrelevant criteria - but they seem to be so numerous, I must have already worked for some of them without realizing it...

dickler2• 13 years ago

I took the alternative approach of auto-generating my resume from my code https://plus.google.com/104659641866805928410/posts/UeNDaZhE...

lucb1e5• 13 years ago

Has it scored you any jobs or interviews yet?

dickler2• 13 years ago

Yes/No (it's been 2 weeks, only a couple of email enquiries/telephone interviews).

I've got no job experience and no college education so it's an uphill struggle. I'm trying to innovate with the resume to overcome that (I can code/write etc, but don't have the standard papers/references).

rbnio• 13 years ago

I'm a graduate student (CS) from Europe and just prepared my CV/Résumé for internship applications at U.S. companies, so the comments in this thread are very helpful.

Are there any websites/communities where I could get feedback and maybe some hints how to improve my CV and project portfolio?

trippy_biscuits• 13 years ago

I prefer a concise, short resume. I interview candidates over the phone so I keep the resume and a condensed job description on the displays in front of me. If the candidate lists something, I ask about it. Knowing what a potential hire did 10+ years ago may be interesting but it's rarely relevant. It provides color but I'm significantly more interested in what was done in the last 3-4 years. When a person hasn't exercised a technical skill for 3+ years, that skill may be obsolete and/or the candidate may prove unable to apply that skill.

Why is it important to have a shorter résumé?

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