Here’s a topic worth revisiting: You have probably been told that your resume needs to be a mere one page in length. That’s been the conventional wisdom since I’ve been a career professional. The traditional thinking has been that overworked hiring managers will get frustrated with too much content, seeing a lot of it as irrelevant.
I was taught that a single-page resume was ideal for those without much relevant experience, and only after about 10 years did one dare to go to 2 pages. (There are exceptions, of course, notably in academia and the medical professions, where people most often have multi-page curriculum vitae. Some of my professor friends have chapter headers in theirs!)
On the other side of the debate, the longer resume proponents say that 2 pages allows a person to provide more details of what they’ve actually accomplished instead of forcing all of that experience onto a tiny document.
But what’s that based on? As it turns out, not much! In fact, it turns out that until really recently, there wasn’t really any empirical evidence either way. So in late 2018, the professional resume writing service ResumeGo decided to find out. They conducted a study with 482 professionals, all of whom had direct experience with employee recruitment and were either recruiters, hiring managers, human resources professionals, or C-Suite level executives. The participants were put through a hiring simulation in which they were asked to screen resumes for a multitude of job positions, mimicking what they do in real life.
And the results? The recruiters in the study preferred 2-page resumes, regardless of the job level. In fact, “out of the 7,712 resumes that participants chose in the simulated hiring process, a whopping 5,375 of these resumes were two pages in length. This means that recruiters were 2.3 times as likely to prefer two-page resumes over one-page resumes.”
The participants, in fact, spent almost twice as long looking at the longer resumes. They were informed before the exercise that their responses would be timed and that they should screen resumes like they would in real life. Conventional wisdom in career development circles is that recruiters spend just a few seconds on their initial resume review, but these folks spent an average of 2 minutes, 24 seconds on one-page resumes and 4 minutes, 5 seconds on two-page resumes. Apparently they weren’t frustrated with the “irrelevant” details!
Even for those entry-level positions—the ones I was taught didn’t merit two pages—the study participants were 1.4 times as likely to prefer two-page resumes over one-page. For higher-level jobs, the employers’ preference rises to nearly 3 times more likely to prefer the longer resume.
The 2-pagers also got better scores across the board. The participants were asked to rate what they’re reviewed on a score of 1-10, and the longer versions consistently got higher marks. Again, the numbers rise for the positions requiring more experience, but the longer resumes averaged 21% higher than the shorter ones. If those were grads, that’d move you from a high C to an A!
I call that science in action. Now, bear in mind that this was just one study and shouldn’t be considered conclusive proof of anything. 482 professionals is a decent sample size but not giant, and participants knew they were part of a study. But this is the first empirical research I know of on the topic, and it’s absolutely going to impact my perspective on resumes moving forward. I hope it will free you from the one-page prison, as well.
