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Comment by alistairjcbrown | Hacker News Reader

"Your CV should be about three pages" - I had always been told, keep your CV to two pages, so you can print it on one sheet of paper (both sides).

I like it as it ties back into the main message of these slides: "reading CVs is a chore" so keeping it condensed helps me to focus with showing only the most valuable information.

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I have been told that it should be one page unless you have had a really long career. Was this bad/outdated advice?

Probably outdated - for my first job search, a recruiter shopped around a beefed up version of my resume that spanned two pages instead of the one I had it. I was surprised that the old adage was not used in practice.

Probably outdated but still parroted relentlessly in resume advice.

I've always tried to keep mine to one page. But I've been doing some interviewing at my current company recently and all the ones I see are 2-4 pages, so maybe I'm the only one doing that.

It's not necessarily bad advice. Brevity is appreciated in all things -- especially by an HR worker or hiring manager, who has to sift through a stack of 300 resumes in a week or so. But it's not a hard-and-fast rule. Also, the one-page advice originated on the non-technical side of the job market. Technical resumes are usually longer than non-technical resumes.

Three pages is pushing it, though, unless you've been around for more than 10 years, or if you have something unique about your history that doesn't quite fit into your Experience section. If you've been granted 20 patents, or if you've been published 20 times in the Harvard Business Review, then by all means, include a section on these things. (But only if you feel they're relevant).

It really depends where you live. In the US it seems you list every significant position you ever held. In Western Europe I have always been told the CV should never takes more than one side. I don't know about other continents or culture.

Yep, I never go longer than two pages.

That seems the ideal length - first page is a bit more career context, second page is pretty much keyword pounding - a lot of recruiters and corporate HRs use automated keyword analysis (and are skimming over you anyway), I have bullets listing: languages, technologies, specific software packages and skillsets (no matter how "soft"), so once my experience section has hopefully piqued their interest, they can box tick after that.

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