Resume Length: What Is The deal?

If you look on the internet, you will see a lot of conflicting advice about the length of your resume. Some will say keep it to one page. Others will say two is fine and yet others will say whatever it takes to record your work history. I am in the camp of no more than two pages, please! Why? Because someone has to read it and as we all know, people have short attention spans. I once had a high school teacher that had us write a paper and then after giving it back, had us write the same paper with half the length. It was a challenging assignment but a good one, because it showed how you can make your writing more succinct without losing important content. Think of your resume in the same way.  You don’t need to put every job duty on your resume (in fact I would discourage copying and pasting from your job description).  You need to highlight the most important parts of your job and your results. A litany of your job duties could result in a resume that is many pages but will put your friendly recruiter to sleep. Pare it down to the most important job duties, skills and results in your positions. This will help market yourself better and give you better results.

And for you tech people, I have seen resumes going on 10 pages! When I look at the information, there is so much redundancy it is just silly. Yes, you want to showcase your projects and skills, but I will assert that you can do this in a shorter format that at the same time will give you better results.