
Why is it important to have a shorter résumé? - fecak
http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/11/07/10pages/
======
tobyjsullivan
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.

~~~
mattmanser
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.

~~~
cdcarter
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.

~~~
mattmanser
I am indeed in the UK! So yes, sounds like it is a cultural difference. And
not rubbish at all.

~~~
tobyjsullivan
I learned something today! It never occurred to me there might be cultural
differences here.

------
ig1
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.

~~~
bronbron
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?

~~~
ig1
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)

------
Tzunamitom
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...

------
alatkins
Obligatory Rands link: [http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-glimpse-and-a-
hook/](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-glimpse-and-a-hook/)

~~~
fecak
Never read that one, thanks for the share.

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

<Very position-customized and concise cover letter intro>

Github | Blog | Project sites | etc.

<Quickly highlight position-appropriate or interesting repos/posts/projects>

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.

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

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

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

~~~
lucb1e
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.

~~~
fecak
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.

~~~
lucb1e
Not sure middle school was the correct wording, but it's after primary school
anyway. Ages 12-19. In middle school we basically have three primary types of
education, depending on how smart you are (or how well you did in the tests
anyway). At least for me as a student it's still relevant to mention it, even
though I've done plenty of internships and projects to prove things. Maybe
after a few jobs it should be left out, I don't know.

Edit: country is the Netherlands.

> I'd venture to guess that would be customary only in countries where a
> middle school education is generally the highest level obtained.

As you said yourself, cultures differ I guess :)

Edit 2: Looked it up, a better word may be secondary education. Info:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education#Netherlands](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education#Netherlands)

~~~
mtrimpe
What's considered a good resume in the US definitely isn't in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands two to three pages is the sweet spot and a one pager would
be considered odd. If you're just out of University two pages should be
possible though.

You can check out my resume at
[http://michiel.trimpe.nl](http://michiel.trimpe.nl) for a fairly polished
three page CV that works well for the Dutch market.

------
sebarciszewski
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.

------
adeptus
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.

------
jmscharff2
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)

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
fecak
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.

------
TallGuyShort
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...

------
dickler
I took the alternative approach of auto-generating my resume from my code
[https://plus.google.com/104659641866805928410/posts/UeNDaZhE...](https://plus.google.com/104659641866805928410/posts/UeNDaZhEmb8)

~~~
lucb1e
Has it scored you any jobs or interviews yet?

~~~
dickler
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).

~~~
lucb1e
Okay, well at least you're trying something new. That should get some
attention. Good luck!

------
trippy_biscuits
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.

------
__mp
I usually list HTML and CSS as office skills next to Microsoft Office and
LaTeX ;) [http://i.imgur.com/1Yx5PY1.png](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
I like the way that looks. What font did you use for the headings? Body text
looks like Century?

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

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/](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...

------
rbnio
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?

------
dredwerker
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?

~~~
mech4bg
Out of interest, who's telling you it needs more detail?

~~~
dredwerker
The agents.

~~~
mech4bg
Huh.

There's definitely a strong culture of having longer resumes in Australia - my
original resume was 3-4 pages long, which I whittled down to 2 when I moved to
the US (and could easily get down to 1 now). I think it's a waste of time
though, no one actually reads through all that stuff when it's that long. If
people need further detail after seeing a one page summary they can ask.

But obviously you just have to deal with whatever people expect. I wonder if
the agents are right though, or if it's just what they're used to? I've only
ever hired in Australia, only applied for one job while I was there, so I
don't have no first hand knowledge of applying for jobs with a shorter resume.
I know I definitely appreciated the shorter resumes when I had to look through
them though.

~~~
fecak
Are Australian recruiters and hiring managers actually reading all those pages
thoroughly? I've rarely had to encourage candidates in the US to beef up their
resumes (sometimes they need to add more tech content), but I'd probably
advise over 50% to trim them down.

------
allard
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.

~~~
fecak
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.

------
cletus
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](http://www.python.org/~guido/Resume.html)

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

~~~
lucb1e
> 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 ;)

------
bane
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
> 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?

~~~
bane
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.

------
makmanalp
> 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.

~~~
bane
> 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
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](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=base64+online)

