HOW MANY PAGES SHOULD A CV HAVE? – How many pages should a resume have? This is a question that many of the people I serve ask me. There is a differences of opinions and a multitude of types of resumes. My opinion is based on my recruitment experience and exchanges with other HR professionals.
First of all, I want to highlight the difficulty of writing about how to write a resume, because their thousands of options, depending on the trajectory of each one, offer, the company… Each case is different, and each person could have more of a resume.
Resume: one or two pages?
Generally, a resume should have a maximum of two pages. There is a lot of talks that a summary must have at most one page, but sometimes this goes against making a good resume, adapted offer and where skills are highlighted.
Whoever can make a one-page resume perfect. As a rule, it occurs in the following cases:
- Candidates with little experience due to age.
- Candidates who have always worked in the same way bring together their experiences, detailing the functions performed and the knowledge acquired in a single section.
- Candidates who have developed their experience for years in a single company or have worked for a long time in one company.
- Visual and Design Resumes
It is not advisable to reduce it to one page if we eliminate information that could interest our candidacy. For example, we tend to remove features to fit on one page or describe them very briefly, so the reader may not be clear on what we know how to do. In these cases, it is not appropriate. It’s okay to have two pages of a resume.
It is true that if we have two pages, it is interesting that the most important thing for the candidacy to which we present ourselves appears on the first one. The aim is to avoid an effect that occurs in recruitment professionals. When you read a CV that provides information on the first page irrelevant to the offer, the recruiter may wonder why this person has sent the CV. Despite Even though evant information appears on the second page, it seems that we have not written a suitable resume for the offer or that we do not know how to highlight what is interesting. It can also happen that it does not go beyond this first page due to lack of interest, ruling out the candidacy.
And a Curriculum of more than two pages?
A resume of more than two pages runs the risk of being heavy and forcing the person in charge of the selection to do a detailed reading, which goes against the speed reading used to keep 3-5 resumes. What do you need for the job? Even so, some cases can have more than two pages: Managerial staff, academic CVs…
For all these reasons, I usually say that the European curriculum is not valid in most cases, especially if what you want is to work in your own country. It is a curriculum that is difficult to read, with many inputs and irrelevant information. In another post, I will comment on when this curriculum is necessary, but fewer European countries use it.
Summing up: How many pages can a CV have?
- Better a resume adapted to the offer that highlights what may be of interest to the recruiter than one with one page that eliminates exciting information. In fact, whether the resume is one, two or three pages long, it must always be adapted to the offer and written for quick reading.
- Two pages are correct, knowing that the content of the first is the one that engages. Sometimes, you already have enough with what appears on the first page, and you don’t even look at the second, or you do it at a glance.
- There may be resumes of more than two pages, but only in specific cases. For example, an academic overview. The length of the resume also depends on the form, since some can be shared digitally including text and video. Imagine that you was tonto integrate a resume and video, for example, those who have a portfolio and o a video presentation. You can create a resume of this type with Adobe Spark, a very interesting application.
How many pages should a Curriculum Vitae have?
When making your curriculum vitae, a big question may arise: how many pages should my CV have? And the answer will depend on the type of offer, company and position for which you are competing.
Without a doubt, the correct answer is: be as brief as you can. What recruiters need is for you to give as much information in little space as possible and using few words .
Why resume size matters
The reason resume length matters is because recruiters need to know what you’re really good at. What if you’ve world of work for 10 years, but you haven’t really achieved anything transcendent the companies where you’ve . Therefore, a two-page CV already seems suspicious, has the candidate really achieved so much?
