THE BEECHMONT CREST CAREER GUIDE:
SURVIVING AND THRIVING IN THE CORPORATE JUNGLE
CHAPTER 2: WINNING RESUMES
Your resume is your personal brochure
Your resume is the logical place to begin your job search activities. Although a successful job seeker has many intangible tools in her arsenal (networking skills, personal organization, etc.), the resume is the primary tangible tool of every aspirant in the job market.
You have no doubt read many product brochures. The purpose of the brochure is to provide enough information to pique the reader’s interest without overloading him with details. The same is true of the resume. A good resume should be concise.
Counterpoint: The one-page resume rule
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”
-Albert Einstein
During my senior year in college, I once asked a friend to review my resume. Two days later, he returned my two-page curriculum vitae with some handwritten suggestions, and a single point of verbal feedback: “You have to get the length down to one page,” he said. “No one bothers to read a resume that is more than one page long.”
I gave the document a second reading, and came to the conclusion that my undergraduate resume was indeed a bit too lengthy at two pages. I followed my friend’s advice, and pulled out my editing shears. By the time I was done, I had trimmed my resume down to one page of pure marrow.
The truth behind my friend’s advice was this: resumes should be concise, and structured so that a person can grasp the main points by a quick visual scan of the document. This usually mandates the use of bulleted lists rather than full paragraphs, and a merciless appraisal of each word included in the resume. Let there be no mistake about it—resumes should be lean and mean. Every ounce of fat must be cut.
However, many have deviated from the legitimate quest for conciseness into a simplistic fixation on the one-page resume. Some job seekers seem to imagine legions of implacable resume screeners who automatically shred any resume that does not conform to the one-page rule. (I have seen resumes created in illegible 7- and 8-point fonts so that the text would not exceed one page.) However, such fears have a negligible grounding in reality. In fact, I have never met a single human resources manager who has a blanket aversion to two-page resumes.
You will inevitably reach a point where your experience, skills, degrees, and other qualifications can no longer be meaningfully captured in a single page. If you have been in the job market for more than 10 years, then you may need more than one page to describe your qualifications. Hiring managers and others understand this, and will not penalize you if your resume justifiably exceeds one page in length—as long as it is concise and structured for a quick reading.
Copyright 2006 Beechmont Crest Publishing