A question I often get asked is “How long should a resume be?”

And when I put this to professionals who are in their career who are 10 or so years in, a lot of the answers come down to one page!

As a university student or a student just out of high school, a lot of the advice you will get is to keep it to a maximum of 2 pages.

This is around where I sit. I say a maximum of two pages for any resume.

The moment you go over 2 pages it becomes more than one sheet printed out and people aren’t going to have time to read it all. There’s an inverse relationship as the more information you’ve got on your resume, the less people are going to read.

I have a one-page resume that was taken down from a three-page resume. I’m going to say that every person has the opportunity, if you have a two or three page resume, to have a look and see what you can do to really be focussed and get it down to one-page.

When someone, reviews your resume it is going to take about 7-10 seconds max for a professional recruiter to look at you resume and get that first impression.

A couple of things that they are going to look at include what is the company, what was the role, what was the date and then maybe education.

They are just trying to get a sense of what’s there and to get a quick snapshot so you want it to be easy to read and all on one page and presentable.

Doing the work to make it one page is ultimately going to mean your resume is concise, sharp, tightly edited and be able to make more of an impact than having the information split across 2 or 3 pages.

Get your resume as small as possible and try your best to condense it down to one page at the best or two pages the absolute max.