Ask HN: At what point do you have 2 pages in your resume?

Added a second page after about 10 years of experience. Not planning to ever add a third. Nobody cares about what you did three jobs ago, so I'm content with having my early gigs summarized to literally a single line each. There's also the option of dropping them entirely if ageism becomes an issue.

As an ex-hiring manager, resumes over 3 pages were almost guaranteed to have a ton of useless (to the reader) detail that obscured the signal and any kind of messaging the candidate wanted to convey with this document. This is such a critical thing that many people miss - the product you are selling is your experience, and the resume is the sleek marketing document, not the dry technical specification (I don't mean this literally, but 5-15 page resumes, I'm looking at you).

I have never heard of this "one page" rule. Maybe it's meant for those people who cram every detail and buzzword in their resume mistakenly thinking that if they chance on the right combination of words it will help them.

Mine is one and a half. I think it's more important that it's easy to read, if you're trying to fit everything into one page and it becomes dense or overly brief it defeats the purpose of the rule.

These rules are made up employment coaches (or whatever they're called) who need content to write about and want you to hire them for their consulting services.

A Resume is a crapshoot anyway, anyone can put anything they want in it - most of it is unverifiable until tested. As long as you have the required skillset, the important thing is that you don't act weird in the interview.

I'm not an HR person, but I have been involved in hiring people who work under me or alongside me. I've never penalized anyone for having 2 pages, or been penalized for it when I applied for jobs.

However, I would excise older jobs if they are not relevant, or didn't make you look better. "Mail room intern (trial basis)" or "Junior fry cook, McDonalds (6 months)" are not going to help you get a senior dev role, so just leave them off and save the reviewer's time. Your resume doesn't have to be a complete, unbroken history of your employment to be useful in my opinion.

I’ve prepared a three-page version with the intent of reducing it down to a page or two per application. I ended up using the full version in all applications with project specific highlights in each.

I’ve never had a one-page resume. It was two pages until recently. I’ve played a lot of roles (backend, front end, kernel, system level, infrastructure, product design, leadership, consulting) and a longer resume makes it easier to show that versatility — its my major selling point.

I think what to put there and how to phrase it is MUCH more important than length.

As they say, resumes are marketing documents. Any “rules” are more like guidelines/conventions, they can all be broken given a good reason to do so, but if you don’t have a good reason it’s best not to.

To more directly answer your question. Your resume can go to two pages if, after you’ve VIGOROUSLY edited your resume down for clarity and concision, it ends up over one. People will hold up some number of years of experience or another metric, but really you can have two if and when you can seriously justify every word on the page that takes it past one.

I was in one interview where I had an 8 page resume and was told by one of the interviewers that it was OK because I had a PhD. (It wasn't a job that required a PhD!)

If you have more than 1 page the first page should summarize it in a way that gets the attention of whoever is reading it.

I wouldn't say it's _never_ OK to have a multi-page résumé, but as a hiring manager/interviewer I do strongly prefer one-pagers.

I never penalize or reject candidates based on having a multi-page résumé, but I tend to see a strong correlation between candidates with great one-page résumés and great written communication skills. It shows that they've spent the time to consider what's relevant to the hiring manager/recruiter/etc.

IMO, keep the résumé short and sweet, and stick to the highlights, with a heavier emphasis on more recent experience. If you really want to dive into more detail on something, write a cover letter tailored to the position/company you're applying for.

It depends on what you do, who your target audience is, how competitive it is to flag someone's attention from a pool of candidates, and how competitive it is to get the position. The tech field comments here perhaps capture one extreme of that with recruiters and keywords so I'll give a contrast.

If you are in academia you probably teach courses, get grants, are a PI, publish and present at conferences, get awards, be invited to give lectures, contribute to books or some combination of all these over your career and your CV should reflect that. I've seen academic resumes with 40+ pages of publications, 5+ pages of grants alone without any effort at padding. This stuff is important when applying for promotion and grants, getting involved at a higher level in or out of your institution even if you aren't looking for a new job.

Another case is when applying for something competitive e.g. graduate or medical school where transcripts attest to academic achievement and a CV should be highlighting various domains of their work ethic, scientific achievement, extracurricular achievements to round an individual out and score points on standardized rubrics. A longer resume e.g. 4/5 pages probably doesn't penalize compared to losing points by not reporting on this at all even if a bit excessive.

I keep my academic resume around ~2 pages of core content and then a longer running bibliography. I trim sections of my life as they becomes successively irrelevant e.g. undergraduate awards/jobs/volunteering, medical school involvement/leadership/research (publications stay elsewhere), etc. as these all helped me to get a next stage but are no longer relevant.

My resume's got 4 pages, going back ~25y (though you can get a pretty good picture of my recent experience on the front page)

Don't get hung up on the length - resumes are 100% digital nowadays

Do get "hung up" on precision, action, and measurable achievements (whenever possible) in your resume's bullet points

Do be careful about spelling, listing relevant "non-work" experience, where you went to school, etc

Do be as brief as possible - but no briefer

Totally, but it depends on the story you're trying to tell. I'm still early in my career and my resume is broken up to provide a summary of key parts of my work/ career to date, the most relevant/recent experience first, then highlight skills, education, and finally a brief list of other positions I've held. I've definitely dropped jobs from that last section, so it's not a full dump. I'm listing these because that additional experience is relevant and both substantiates the summary/ skills section, and shows experience where I lack formal education.

In interviews, I've had people read that far down and it's worked, they got exactly what I wanted them to out of it. In other interviews, it's clear that they didn't care, but the resume still got me in the door. They still got the most important parts up top.

And of course, it depends on who you're interviewing with and what you're applying for. The rules aren't so hard and fast, esp. when you're sending over digital copies.

You resume should tell a compelling story about who you are and what you bring to the table as a prospective employee.

If you are using your space smartly and it takes two pages to tell that whole story, OK. If you can reasonably trim it to one page, you should.

Most people will look at just the first page, but as far as I'm concerned I don't care how long it is, particularly in this job market, I think mine is 3-4

Resume = 1 page. You compress stuff as your backstory gets longer. A multi-paged one is called a curriculum vitae (cv). That goes into more detail.

I like the 1 page per 10 years experience rule of thumb.

Having a one page resume would satisfy my own fondness for brevity, but it isn't happening. I've trimmed it aggressively over the years, and it's a bit over two. I think I could get it down to 2 full pages, but it will spill over again. My hyper-terse C.V. alone is one full page. I have more than 20 years of experience. I have no evidence that it's hurting me.

Outside of the US, I believe CVs are regularly longer than 1 page.

For the North America, a cover letter and 1 page are standard. I've had a 2 pager, but I'm also old AF and changed jobs regularly. I don't use my entire history, but stick to the relevant stuff. If it's something that helps them have a better understanding of who you are, then go for it.

My 2 cents.

When you have enough content to fill a second page. I'm a firm believer in the rule of "Make your point on the first page, tell your story on the second." If someone gets to the second page, show them why you stand out. List your hobbies, skills, unique projects, etc.

I have many pages. Helps you stand out if someone wants to dive deep and helps with keyword filtering.

Add a "summary" section at the top summarizing 3-5 key accomplishments in your career quantifying them as much as possible. If you don't capture the readers attention with that, doesn't matter how many pages you have. That's your superbowl ad.

Once I had been working about 6 or 7 years.

I have more detail in the newer jobs. It's 3 or 4 now, it goes back to 1999 there isn't much space with alternating between perm and contract.

Worked at places between 3 weeks and 3 years, but probably about 20 or so listed and other info.

I'm still at a single page with ~20 years of experience. I've completely dropped the two less relevant jobs I had right after college.

It probably depends on the industry. I think academics and jobs where publications are important tend to have more pages.

I made extra effort to fit all in one page and I think it is worth it because it's a sign of respect for the reader's time.

Had to trim some details of old roles and make font a bit smaller.

During interviews I have the chance to expand on my experience.

I look at the first page to see skills they are most up to speed with. I look at the other pages as skills they could potentially provide if the need arises but I’m expecting them to have some degree of rust

As I said in one of similar threads: keep it short.

Nobody interested what I can manage Kerio WinRoute Firewall 6 and I don't want to work where it could be a factor in my employment.

I used to have 2-3 pages but nobody read anything so I narrowed it down to just one sentence per job with a paragraph intro. 1 page. Worked about as well.

I think it's fine either way.

If you're a senior person with, say, 20+ years of experience and only the last 6-8 years fit on the first page then put a second on there.

Given the formatting required for easy parsing (either by ATS or by humans) you can count on every employer and every role to require at least 3 or 4 lines at a minimum (company, timing | Job title | some descriptor or activities and/or successes | line break before next job), I'd say if you've had more than 3 or 4 meaningfully relevant roles you could make the case for a second page. I don't think 3 or more is often warranted, at that point you need curation more than you need more "space"

Two pages is fine. It’s very easy these days to add a “see LinkedIn for more details” disclaimer.

Gee mine then is clearly too long over 22 years multiple orgs and projects. I’ll trim it.

If you need more space you can just nak the page a bit taller. It's all digital anyway.