Mistake: Resume Over Two Pages

Many people make the job search mistake of sending out resumes over two pages to prospective employers. People are filling up resumes with endless jobs, responsibilities, information, and whatever else they can think of, all to the horror of HR people, recruiters, and hiring authorities. If this is you, you have to stop and re-evaluate what you are doing. You are needlessly putting yourself at a disadvantage with something as important as employment.

Resumes that are too long are a prime example of people making assumptions based on what they believe to be good information. Where this supposedly good information came from is a mystery, but they are surely not using information based on having worked in staffing, headhunting, employment, and human resources for many years. In a nutshell, people are working off of a faulty present level of awareness. Resumes would be just one of many examples in which this happens. The results of not increasing awareness levels on the topic of resumes include less job options and choices, settling for lesser jobs, working at lower quality companies, longer job searchers, and many others.

Let's get right to the deniers who say a three page resume is fine. After all, how could a three plus page resume be bad if all I am doing is putting in my work experience, skills, education, etc. Here again, this person is thinking solely based on what they believe is accurate, but it is not. Most people believe that listing endless information on a resume translates into the perception of a lot of experience and a more qualified candidate. This is a false assumption. The physical length of a resume and showing endless jobs and job responsibilities does nothing in the mind of the reviewer to think that someone is more experienced. Mostly, it just irritates them.

What employers mostly think when they see endless pages of information and piles of jobs that are often irrelevant, short-term, contract, self-employment, overlapping, etc. is what is this person's problem. More is not more on a resume. More is not going to impress anyone, and this also includes not putting every job title you ever had while working at an employer. Including the every last detail on a resume also often translates into the perception of one of those annoying people who talks too much, especially about themselves. If this is the first time you have heard it, jobs going back 15-40 years or six jobs showing in the last eight years is a mistake, if for no other reason than the job market likes fresh and some semblance of employment stability. Recent and relevant sells, not old and outdated. There are creative ways to package / spin your resume to overcome all of these obstacles in the minds of the people doing the hiring.

The deal is that a person reviewing your resume is going to go through an exact process when they open your resume. Recruiters, HR, and hiring managers develop this system because it logically helps them to be more efficient and get what they need so they can move on to other tasks they enjoy more. When you send a resume that is out of focused and three, four, or five pages long the first thing they think is, here we go again. This is not how you want to start a relationship. Rest assured that NOBODY is reading all of this information. What you have done by sending a document like this is that you have watered down nearly all of the critical points that you want to get across and that easily need to be found. Targeted, relevant, and focused content has an impact, not pages of useless blather. An intelligent resume writer will help you decide what should stay and what should go.

The bottom line is that you need someone to tell you what to keep and put on your resume and how to package it. Don't be in denial about this. This is too important of a topic to be obstinate. Regardless of the job you do, you want a sharp, crisp, succinct, and professional resume presentation to show employers. Employers are making decisions and assumptions about you when you cannot say it in two pages or less. They like a clean easy to follow story and they are not interested or impressed with a lot of information that is not relevant to the job they have open. 

You only want to put your absolute best information in front of employers on your resume. You have heard it many times before that you have little time to grab attention, sell your case, and get an interview. By the way, do you ever see advertising literature or marketing brochures that are multiple pages long? Of course not. Whatever you do, do not ever go beyond two pages on a resume. There would also be no circumstance that we have encountered where an entry level job seeker should go beyond a one page resume. If you send a two page resume to an employer as an entry level job seeker it will not be well received and likely deleted.