Resume Length?

[Aggie_Ama]

I try to keep mine at 1 page because that is what I was told to do in college to keep interest. Is 11 year old information completely relevant? Can it be discussed in the interview? Can it be put in a skills section and explanded upon? Can you cut down to the bare bones on description? Can you reformat to save space? If not then I guess you need a longer one.

I had to recently polish mine to get my new job and I was told after I was hired it was the best looking one although it was other factors that got the job. Mine has my time spent working through college (now 9 years old) because I was management and find it relevant plus when I was in college I was told working through college is very interesting. Although now I have been out 6 years not sure how interesting it is. It has my post college job. My most recent former job which entailed a promotion and two positions. It was a struggle of my editing training to fit a page. My former co-worker let me see hers and since she was finishing her MBA it was 2 pages because her education was a lot bigger. But she also went in depth with internships which I did not have the luxury of doing and has more positions to put on which are relevant.

[sundial]

I would keep it to 1 page and includes the most recent work experience as well as other job experiences that directly relate to the position you are seeking.

[Mr. Bloom]

I vote one page too. Perhaps you can list the positions, but just expand on the most relevant ones and/or you can use the cover letter in sync to provide insight in the skills gained.

[tctrek]

One page is best. Here's a great podcast on resumes: http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/10/your-resume-stinks

[NoNo]

My brother does interviews at his company and always said he doesn't bother looking at anything longer than a page. They have a lot of resumes to go through, you don't want yours to be the long one. Find a way to weed it down to the essentials, the ones most pertinent to the position you're applying for. Good luck!

[sfa]

I'm going to go against the grain here. I think the right length is as long as you need it to be--as long as you are careful not to include irrelevant or redundant information and as long as it is well written and clearly formatted. I've seen too many people try to cram too much information on one sheet just to hit that magical one page limit, but they use a font that is too small to read and a format that is wordy and hard to follow.

Since entering the professional world a million years ago, I haven't seen any good resumes that are just one page except for those of people who just graduated from college. If you've had decent work experience, you're going to go onto two pages. And in academia, two pages would be the work of a neophyte--once you add in all of your publications you're absolutely going to stray onto four pages or more. But that's something different.

You don't need to include every job, obviously, and you don't need to explain the job requirements of all of the jobs. The norm now is to tailor your resume to the job you're trying to get, so you'd want to include the jobs where you learned the skills you'd need in this new position, but leave out anything more than your most recent two or three jobs unless they are extremely relevant to the position you want. Save the explanation of soft skills for the cover letter and resume--the assumption from an employer is that everyone comes with certain soft skills that will be helpful, and everyone has a different cocktail of these skills. The interview is where those come out. Same thing with showing continuity of employment and that you're not afraid to work--they're going to assume that to be the case unless your resume shows big gaps of time not working (years, mostly, and only after age 21 or so). In fact, showing multiple short term jobs may work against you, no matter how interesting those jobs were--they might look at lots of short term jobs and think "geez, this woman can't keep a job. What's wrong with her?"

So I'd worry less about the length and more about the content and how it's presented. I'm more likely to toss a resume if I can't find what I'm looking for or if it is simply badly presented.

Good luck!

Sarah

[tctrek]

Also, if you are applying from a job board online, frequently the resume is first scanned and sorted by a program. The program is searching your document for key words that indicate that you are qualified for the job. For example if the job requires a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, the scanning program could be searching your resume for these words and if it isn't there, your resume will be rejected and never seen by human eyes.