How Long Should Your Resume Be?

Years ago the conventional wisdom on resume length said that no matter how long your career is, your resume should still fit on one page. The thinking was that it should be instantly skimmable, with hirers able to get the key points in a matter of seconds.

Well, the part about picking up key points hasn't changed -- hiring professionals on average spend less time than ever reading each individual resume. The rules on resume length, however, have surprisingly loosened up despite that fact.

Some experts try to attach a rule of thumb to how long a resume should now be, saying for instance that beyond a certain number of years in a career, a resume should go to two pages. But since everyone's career is different and every job is different, such rules don't work very well in practice.

So instead, simply do the best you can to describe your career as compellingly as possible, and see where the length falls. You shouldn't force it into one page, or try to pump it up unnaturally to a second page. Resumes tend to have a mind of their own. Get all the pertinent experience into a word processing document and you'll pretty quickly get the sense that it should be one way or another.

The important thing is to give your experience the treatment it deserves. For example, if you're a truck driver, and you've had three very similar jobs with local trucking companies, it would most likely take a lot of padding and filler to make your resume go into a second page.

On the other hand, if your last four jobs were complex management positions that entailed numerous unique projects, special assignments, and changing roles both within the company and from job to job, it would probably take severe hatchet-type cutting to hack your resume down to just one page.

However it falls though, your resume shouldn't ever go to a third page. If you're having a hard time keeping it shorter than that, look closely at the kinds of things you're including. If you're spilling onto a third page, there's a good chance you're listing jobs too far back in your career. Employers really only care about the last ten, maybe 15 years of your work.