Job Search Tips: How to Fill Up Space When Your Resume is Too Short

No matter how much experience you have, your resume should always be somewhere between one and two pages long. But if you're just starting your career, or you've spent a lot of time in one particular job, then you may have a problem even filling one page.

It doesn't look too impressive if the description of your entire career fits onto just a third of a page, even if you're a graduating student with no experience. Follow these quick steps for filling out the page on a short resume.

More Introduction
One of the most flexible areas on a resume is its introduction. Those first few sections at the top, including an objective, summary, career highlights, and other overview material can easily be lengthened to fill out a resume. Be thankful that you have this problem. It allows you to go into much greater detail and market yourself much more aggressively than if you were forced to pare it down to the basics about your career.

Add a Headline
I recommend this technique every chance I can, because it works. It's a great way to add focus and power to your resume. And for shorter resumes like yours, it has the extra benefit of easily taking up an extra half-inch or so of room by the time you put in the necessary returns above and below the headline. Make the headline a combination of where you've been and where you'd like to go. For example, if you've worked in warehouses and you want to move into logistics management, make your headline something like, "Accomplished Warehousing and Logistics Specialist."

Wider Margins
If your resume's text is still falling short, one of the first things to try is to adjust the page margins. You have plenty of room for adjustment in this regard before the document will look odd. Keep it somewhere between .5 and 1.25 inches and it'll be fine.
That range of adjustment alone can make a huge difference in where the end of your text falls on the page.