My dad does a lot of hiring. He says he spends about a couple of minutes on each resume that crosses his desk (he usually evaluates hundreds for any given position). That amount of time is enough to give one page due consideration, two pages an adequate read, but not to do anything more than skim through a 3+ page resume. Especially a dense one.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of the classic resume guidelines (chronological ordering) are not conducive to building a resume that highlights the relevant parts of someone's experience.
Projects: If they are open to the public, link to them. Show, don't tell. If they aren't public, then they go under the job history section as brief descriptions.
Schooling: One line, degrees and years separated by semicolons. If your last schooling was over eight years ago, drop any non-national-level honors/awards.
Start dropping details of jobs that ended over five years ago. They get two or three lines only. More recent jobs can have 5 to 8 lines of details each.
A resume is a conversation starter, not the conversation.
- Name, email, and phone number.
- "Free Software / Open Source Software Project Experience": a paragraph for each major FOSS project I've contributed to, and why those contributions matter. This section is most of what the engineers and managers responsible for interviews and hiring care about, and is directly responsible for getting me to the interviews.
- "Publications and Presentations": a list of presentations given at major conferences and papers published in journals. This is most of the rest of what those same engineers and managers care about.
Those two sections together take up the entire first page. I shrink or drop older or less relevant bits of the FOSS project experience section over time to keep it about the same length; the publications and presentations do actually spill over onto the second page, but the most important ones all fit on the first page.
The second page has:
- The remainder of the "Publications and Presentations" section.
- "Proficiencies": a list of keywords for languages, libraries, and technologies I have expertise in. Present primarily for people and search engines scanning for particular keywords.
- "Education": a couple of lines per degree, listing the degree, university, date, and GPA. Primarily for HR folks applying filters based on degree or GPA, or for managers looking for what level to hire at, although a sufficiently high GPA will successfully draw interest from engineers too.
- "Employment": Company, dates, and a one-line summary. Everything actually interesting about what I did in those jobs is on the first page under "Project Experience"; what's left is just the boilerplate.
- "Awards and activities": extracurricular stuff, academic honors, etc.
Not really - I think we have a tendency to, as the article notes, want to list every single thing just incase they find it relevant. They probably won't, and it's probably unimportant to the position.
To me, having a multi-page resume is usually an indicator that you're mass-applying (which you should, no doubt) and can't be bothered to tailor the resume to the position you're applying for (which is bad).