Giant Résumés Fail to Impress Employers
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
My current resume (LaTeX 4 life) is 2 pages. It's fairly detailed, and I feel like it gives a good overview of who I am. It has lists of my work experiences (with key achievements and technologies used), education (with specializations and details about my undergrad/graduate thesises), talks, open source projects, volunteering activities - the whole deal.
Then one day a friend of mine joked that in the tech industry, where everything must use emojis and communicate in <140 chars, a 1 page resume is the way to go. I made a 1 page resume (without sacrificing legibility or using 0pt margins), and it's grown on me. It's concise, to the point, no BS- and I feel like it still gives a good window in who I am and what I do (and like to do).
But some friends have said that a one page concise resume came across as ballsy and too confident.
Any HNers have insights on this? Or is it one of those things into which one should put the least amount of thought possible?
But regarding your question, I think two pages is perfectly fine in the tech world, if you have enough to say. By the time you're ten years into a career I'd be surprised if you don't want more than a page to talk about what you know and what you've done. I think the aesthetic gains from a one page resume aren't worth the risk of omitting something that's important to a potential employer. It's the four page resumes that annoy me.
I think keeping it to one page shows respect for a reader's time. Instead of dumping everything I can think of onto the page and letting them pick through it for what's important, I do that work for them. In many cases I've customized the résumé to some extent for the employer.
I've never had anyone tell me it was too short.
A well-laid out resume does this for the reader. Basically, the reader should be able to get a high-level idea of the applicant by quickly reading the top of each section/subsection, and then dig deeper into whatever they feel is relevant by moving deeper into the "tree".
Anecdotally, when I interview senior level people (data scientists, but this would apply to software engineers too), more than half the resumes are two pages. It's not abnormal and by no means a deal-killer. The last guy I interviewed had seven jobs and three degrees crammed into a single page - I had to waste 25% of the interview just asking him what he did at each job because his resume didn't tell me (except a title and a really terse summary). This only hurt him because I had less time to build a case to hire him.
I strongly doubt that any serious employer is going to decide to interview or not based on subjective things such as ballsiness. It seems likely to me that they read your number of years of experience and maybe projects, and it's in the interview that they might listen to "gut feelings" such as that.
Usually we have a couple of people involved. We look for consensus and let people veto folks they feel strongly about. The goal is to talk to about 10 people. Interview 3-5.
Long resume doesn't really factor in. The really long ones are usually bozo-ed, because they are insane. The fact that you were a summer lifeguard in 1992 is fascinating, but really weird to be telling people in 2014.
You should be telling a story with a resume. A 2-3 page resume can tell a good one.
CV/Résumés get you interviews.
Interviews get you jobs.
Focus specifically on those things and you'll get a job.
Keep it 2-3 pages tops and just in PDF, unless you're a designer or site dev. And provide your github if you're a dev doing JS or Ruby.
Did I miss anything? I have no idea what Java, etc. devs and IT geeks need to have anymore.