Why is it important to have a shorter résumé?

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.

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.

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...

Obligatory Rands link: http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-glimpse-and-a-hook/

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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)

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...

I took the alternative approach of auto-generating my resume from my code https://plus.google.com/104659641866805928410/posts/UeNDaZhE...

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.

I usually list HTML and CSS as office skills next to Microsoft Office and LaTeX ;) 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?

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?

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?

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.