How long should a resume be?

One page or two

One page if you have under about ten years of relevant experience. Two if you have more than that and the second page earns its place. Three, essentially never, unless you’re in academia or medicine where a CV is a different document with different rules.

The reason the one page rule persists is that it’s usually right for the person asking. Someone six years into a career rarely has a second page of material that helps them. They have a second page of everything they’ve ever done, which is not the same thing.

The failure mode of a two page resume isn’t that it’s long. It’s that page two is where people put the weakest material, and a reader who reaches it forms their last impression there.

How many bullets per job

Seven to eight for your most recent role. Three to five for the one before it. Two or three for anything older than about ten years, and often just a title, employer and date range for the oldest entries.

The distribution matters more than the total. A resume that gives four bullets to every job, including one you left in 2011, is telling the reader that all of it is equally relevant, which it isn’t. Weight the recent work, because that’s what you’re being hired on.

Above eight or nine bullets, two things happen: the reader stops reading, and your best line gets diluted by your fifth best. There’s no bonus for completeness.

The tension nobody mentions

Good advice says one idea per bullet. A bullet doing two jobs should be split. But splitting raises your count, and the count is capped, so “split your compound bullets” and “keep it to eight” are in direct conflict.

The resolution is that splitting has to be paid for. If a bullet needs to become two, something weaker in the same role comes out. In practice that’s almost always a duty line, the kind that describes the job rather than your performance in it, and losing it costs nothing.

What to cut, in order

1. Anything that describes the job rather than you. If your replacement’s resume could carry the identical line, it isn’t telling anyone about you.
2. Objectives and statements about what you’re looking for. The reader knows what you want, you applied. Use the space for a summary of what you bring instead.
3. Skills nobody in your target roles is asking for. They dilute the ones that matter, and a long skills list reads as padding.
4. Jobs older than fifteen years, unless they’re genuinely load bearing for the role you want.
5. References available on request. It has been assumed for about thirty years.

Things that don’t buy you space

Shrinking the font below about ten and a half point, cutting margins under half an inch, or moving content into a sidebar to make the page look shorter. The first two make you harder to read, and the third can break parsing entirely, which costs you far more than a second page would have.

If you’re fighting the page by a few lines, cut a bullet. It’s always the cheaper trade.

The one number worth checking

Count the bullets under your most recent role that contain an actual quantity, and not a year. If it’s under half, length isn’t your problem. A tight one page resume made entirely of duty statements loses to a two page one full of results, every time.