<p>How long should a personal resume be?</p>
<p>Depends: what’s it for? College, internship, job?</p>
<p>One page unless they ask for two.</p>
<p>I am not speaking about resumes that high school students write up for college interviews or college applications. I’m not a big fan of those, and I don’t know the usual or proper formatting.</p>
<p>IMO, resumes of all types for all purposes (except academic Curriculum Vitae for faculty/research) should be no more than one page. Ever.</p>
<p>No business executive wants to spend more time than a 1-pager requires. I don’t think an adcom does either.</p>
<p>If yours is longer than one page, most likely you have not (1) focused it on the particular objective at hand (2) edited to quickly show your strengths.</p>
<p>One page…</p>
<p>One page…</p>
<p>If you are a 50-year old professional, I would expect your resume to go longer than a page, but you still better have a summary section that the HR screener can see at a glance. If you are under 30, it better be one page, with 12-point type.</p>
<p>Even a 50-year-old professional need not include every job on the resume; certainly not every job in equivalent detail. </p>
<p>One page. A resume is not the detailed history of your experience. It is, exactly as it says, a resume. Hit the highlights. Leave them something to discuss in an interview.</p>
<p>Disagree. If you leave too much out the HRbot will assume you are hiding something and toss the resume. Likewise, if the employer is using an automated keyword searcher, if you leave out the wrong job with the wrong word, down the dumper goes the resume. In fact, with electronic submission I would go longer rather than shorter. Your first goal is to get past ElectroHRScreen. If you don’t hit the right keywords, a human will never see your snazzy 1-page resume.</p>
<p>I will not interview anyone with a resume in excess of one page, regardless of credentials or age. That mistake merits an automatic “into the trash pile.” If you aren’t up to that simple editing task, you won’t be a good fit.</p>
<p>Doesn’t it depend on how many jobs you have? If You have 1-2 jobs, one page is ok but what if you have more than 10 jobs total, it’s not unheard of in engineering especially in Silicon Valley to move around, one page might not be enough. So again it depends, but for a young person starting out, 1 page is enough.</p>
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<p>This is the sort of brainless “do it my way or I won’t talk to you” activity in hiring that results in the loss of qualified people for no reason other than their failure to live up to your unexpressed prejudices. If this criterion is so important to you, make sure you include it in your job notice.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I’ve sat in the office with an HR Director who systematically tossed any resumes with any unaccounted-for time in the job history. Any resume without start and end dates for all jobs went into the dustbin, too, as did those printed on non-white paper, printed in “inappropriate” fonts, and where the college degree didn’t have a date.</p>
<p>There is no way to make every employer happy. What is good for one job is going to get someone automatically excluded by someone else. I stopped worrying about it a long time ago. I will say, though, that in a world where a television gets a 2-page datasheet and a new car is introduced with a 16-page glossy brochure, that limiting a discussion of your professional qualifications to a single page is selling yourself short.</p>
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General thinking is that you should drop the least relavent / least recent jobs as you go.</p>
<p>I was always taught one page. I have no idea if things have truly changed with electronic resume scanners. I’m a 50 year old professional and I have no trouble fitting my resume into one page. I even have room to summarize my responsibilities at all the jobs I’ve had and describe some of the buildings I’ve worked on.</p>
<p>As for gaps in your resume, I’ve always been told that they are a bad idea, but I don’t have a problem explaining I was a full time mother for a couple of years. My brother interviewed someone for his office who had to explain that she’d spent two years playing WoW - she’s turned out to be a great asset to the office despite that!</p>
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I don’t drop them. I keep all of mine in my resume and I have never had a problem with finding jobs or interviewing for jobs. In addition, if I don’t list them in my resume, I will forget about certain jobs and have no proof that I worked that many years. Plus some jobs’ pay scale requires that one to have so many years experience, so it’s not one size fits all. But I think the key thing is the technical buzz word, HR often uses a certain keyword to select your resume.
My philosophy about employers that are so quick to toss my resume, is that I’m glad I miss them, there are so many employers out there, why put up with one like that. I don’t even finish the interview process if I find someone I interview with, is so anal. I know I don’t want to work with those people. I’ve been lucky so far, having amazing jobs which allow great flexibility so I don’t have any qualm among missing those employers.</p>
<p>The resume should be only one page if you’re a college or high school student. If you’re a grad student, it’s okay to have 2 pages to list your publications. You should get a copy of the career guide which is usually in the career services center. They tell you how to format your resume so that it is clear and concise.</p>
<p>if your applying to college? only one page?! seems short to me…</p>
<p>Finance, if you are applying to college, what are you thinking you want to put on a resume that would take you beyond one page?</p>
<p>When I was at my hairdresser a few weeks ago, they were scanning a pile of resumes looking for a receptionist. I happened to read one that was three pages… my reaction: “no way, the customers will never get a word in edgewise… she talks too much even when she’s writing!”</p>
<p>My husband (a former engineering VP at several companies and now general manager of our bike business) says “I don’t have time to read past the first page… sell me in the first page.”</p>
<p>It’s true they may not read past the first page or pay attention beyond the first page but that does not mean you should cut off your experience so it can fit in the first page. For example, if someone has graduate degree and undergraduate degree from 2 different schools that is already take nearly half the first page.</p>