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Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

I despise one page resumes. I want detail so I can figure out whether to bother with you or not. The only time a short resume is ok is when you have big names in your employer list, or major awards, or something. If you have Google 2005-2015 or something, you really don't need to say much more beyond what languages/technologies/libraries you used there. But for the other 99% of people, I want to hear what you worked on, in detail. I can skim through a 5 page resume just as fast as a one page resume.

edit: After reading the article fully: This person is the opposite of me. I've read hundreds of resumes, and I want depth and detail so I don't waste my time. Reading resumes is the cheapest part of the process. Just make sure your HR is sending you anything remotely decent, they should only be a very light filter.

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Having reviewed hundreds, maybe over a thousand, resumes in the last decade- I am fully in agreement on hating one page resumes.

That being said, if it’s five pages long, I’m not reading most of it anyway.

Here’s what I care about:

- What has this person been doing the last couple of years?

- Who were they doing it for?

- Scanning their overall work history, does anything interesting (good or bad) stand out. If so, make note for the interview if we get there.

- A list of any accomplishments of note. Patents, speaking engagements, related awards, publications, etc.

I don’t care about your hobbies, your family, or your GPA.

I’m not going to reject your resume because it was too long if I can easily grep the data I’m looking for. I might reject it if it’s too short/empty though.

Because this is what I look for, I keep my resume in the same pattern. The last few years of my work history will contain way more detail. A few years out I start summarizing, 6+ years out its only really big things of note or stuff I’m especially proud of still.

I have a (small) accomplishments section after that, education last. 12 years of history, organized and summarized in about 3 pages with a lot of space.

> I’m not going to reject your resume because it was too long if I can easily grep the data I’m looking for.

I think this is a key point. Layout and presentation are really important. Even 1 page of dense, undifferentiated text is a lot. But 3 pages of well presented, sectioned content is pretty easy to read.

Totally agree. A shitty 5 page resume (and I've seen plenty) is a major turnoff. But so is a shitty 1 page resume (and I've seen even more of those!).

Go ahead and make a five page resume, but:

A) Make it dead simple to visually distinguish between jobs/entries.

B) Put your most important things in the first two lines, because that's all I'm reading until I decide you're worth investing time.

Also, do me a favor and collect all your keywords in one spot so I can skim them. Don't make me read line items to even figure out which technologies you've worked with.

Anyone with more than five years of experience who still does a one page resume either has done absolutely nothing useful or is cheating themselves.

> Here’s what I care about: ...

> I don’t care about your hobbies, your family, or your GPA.

Do you advertise this to prospective candidates, or do you expect them to read your mind and read every other employer's mind?

> Because this is what I look for, I keep my resume in the same pattern.

That's pretty much what I do.

I essentially have two versions of my resume:

Part 1 is a single page, outlines the basics, plus the last 2 or 3 places I've worked at, etc. Just a summary format, but with enough detail for the reader to understand who I am, what I know, and what I can offer them as an employee. The next 2-3 pages are more detailed overviews of those places I've worked in the past that I listed on the summary, plus maybe a couple more.

I tell my recruiter (I work with a couple of independent recruiters from agencies) to pass along either the single page or all pages to the prospective employer, depending on what they think or know that the employer likes to read. If they are like you, they get the full thing; if not they'll get the summary.

When I go to the interview, I take a copy of my full resume, but I ask my recruiter which version they passed along first. That way I know what kind of person I'm probably dealing with in the interview. Regardless, I always make an offer of the "long form" resume, if they'd like a copy (and I take multiple copies in case I need to hand them out to others who may not have a copy).

I've never had a problem with this system. Even so, I read articles like this, and comments like the ones here on HN, and take them in stride, as I feel that my resume is a living document that can always use improvement and updating (especially as my skills expand).

It's funny, I'm the exact opposite of you. I vastly prefer one pagers and find most longer to be unnecessarily verbose.

A sister poster listed a set of bullets they like to see; accomplishments, engagements, projects (I would call this all "telling your story"). I'm of the belief that for most people, you can well and truly fit this on one page. I've gotten patents, spoken at conferences, published papers, worked from tiny contracting firms to tech behemoths, and can tersely summarize the important bits for a given interview in a page.

(I mention this to shake my head at awj's somewhat tone-deaf assertion that someone with >5 years experience and a one pager has accomplished nothing)

When I'm interviewing others I find that there's often a gap between "diminishing returns of what I can get out of a denser resume" and "the meat of really getting to know how you'll perform as an employee", and that the most difficult part for me is less filtering the former and more getting to the heart of the latter when it is at its core an extremely subjective question that one has to explore differently with each candidate.

My overall thesis re short resumes has some obvious caveats: I tailor my resume for the job in question and certainly don't enumerate all, outdated, or irrelevant accomplishments. I also don't tend to include any sort of "personal statement" or longer form in this enumeration; I'd typically consider that a cover letter if one is even applicable.

As an entertaining cap to how differently we seem to approach this, I've even been turning over the idea of condensing my resume onto a business card, and think it's situationaly very possible.

Not to besmirch you, but you outline the 'problem' very well: Hiring managers are people too. This means that they also come in a variety of shapes, colors, sizes, and with personalities and preferences. Essentially, the resume is as much a filter for the candidate as for the employer. Some candidates will have long extensive CVs that will appeal to some employers, some will be a tweet's worth of content that will appeal to others. There is no way to 'win' the application/hiring process. It's more like dating than a test.

Even if "I want detailed resumes" were communicated during the first application, job advice would quickly turn into "You need a resume for each unique demand of resume type", which will likely turn into making at least 3-5 different kinds of resumes.

That makes it worse than dating and hopefully you don't choose from 3-5 versions of yourself in the closet to bring to a date.

Oh jesus, you are right... I would totally do that...

I despise one page resumes. I want detail so I can figure out whether to bother with you or not.

It makes me wonder what sorts of things you are hiring for. Your comments make me think maybe some jobs need more depth to convey qualifications.

(I recently submitted a multipage job application and, in light of that, I am trying to decide how I feel about the comments here and also trying to make sense of them. Surely, there must be more to such preferences than personality of hiring managers.)

At this point I'm mostly involved in hiring senior people (Senior Developers, Principals, Architects, etc). I definitely should modulate my claims by saying that a Junior level position is totally fine having a 1 pager, although I still like to see a couple page from them explaining what projects they've worked on.

The problem with short resumes is that it is easy to hide shallowness. While that is easy to fix in face-to-face interviews, that takes up a lot of time and $$$. If you have to give details about jobs and projects, it becomes more difficult to hide shallowness.

I once interviewed at "7 year C Developer". We brought the person in and after a bit of a chat, asked some basic interview question - build a linked list, or something. We said that you could assume you have a pointer only to the beginning of the list. The person stated, "well, I don't know much about pointers."

Interview over!

Thank you.

I don't how your last question relates to a resume length though. I had a candidate with referral, 28 years experience and a impressive resume. All my colleagues were intimidated to ask him coding questions and he tried to weasel away from that but I insisted he do a quick C linked-list insert question and he said he didn't know much about pointers either. And things started falling apart from there. Some of these people are very good at deflecting questions and guiding the conversation so you know nothing about them in the end except what is in their stellar resumes.

It doesn't prevent lying (or "exaggerating"), but it takes more work to fill in details for a long resume, that's all.

How about a compromise? Submit an outline resume that fits on a single page and provide a link to a huge CV with all the details?

I really like this idea and think it could even be expanded upon. What if applications had a screening survey? You answer a set of questions, auto-scored, and based on that score your resume is accepted or rejected. There can be a box to explain why you think you are qualified which can be read for all applications to stop filtering of good but atypical applicants.

Then you can submit a large resume with that. Hiring managers get more detail but also help in screening that 1-page resumes give the benefit of.

Even better, we really should get rid of the "make your own resume idea" and come up with a standard resume format by industry. Companies can then add supplements as needed.

I know someone who applied for a job at Whole Foods corporate -- they had a simple seven question questionaire that screened this way. Cool idea!

> Even better, we really should get rid of the "make your own resume idea" and come up with a standard resume format by industry. Companies can then add supplements as needed.

This would backfire terribly. As someone who's mostly done macOS development over the last 3 decades, I can't tell you how many jobs have made assumptions that all of your work was done in Windows, with Visual Studio. If there were some sort of standard format, it would make very dumb assumptions like that and I'd be unable to fill it out. Fuck it. I'd rather just submit a resume I came up with on my own. I can tailor it to the employer I'm working with easily.

I don't think a standardized format prevents that. What I'm thinking of is more how you when can apply to jobs with Linkedin, it takes away factors like resume design/layout and can make the lives of hiring staff easier. Not "fill in x years of experience for Visual Studio" but more "list your jobs, what you did there. list your skills. list your education. No PDF/Word/Photoshop etc and all that. You make this resume and you apply with that to all jobs in your industry (of course with the ability to tailor it to an employer as needed).

I've seen a handful of those, and I love them. Not necessarily for me, but for the people that look at the resume before me (HR, Head hunters, etc).

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