Should a Resume Be
One or Two Pages?

Does a resume have to be one page? Despite what you may have read online, there is no absolute "rule" for resume length and recruiters don't care much about it.
Your resume can be more than one page, but there is no smoke without fire, and if you are getting negative feedback on CV length, it is probably because of its content rather than the number of words…

Sounds confusing? I know, let me explain…

I spent years on the other side of job applications. At Google I was screening for the whole EMEA region for several large orgs, which meant working through an incredible volume of resumes. I’ve seen all shapes, lengths and designs.

Because Google is an attractive company, the pool of candidates was excellent, which meant difficult screening decisions between great profiles. As a recruiter, I was looking for differentiators between candidates. That is Unique Selling Points, performance signals… proof that they were great at their job. To do that, I needed substantial content from candidates.

You’ve probably heard that “recruiters don’t have much time to spend on a resume so keep it short” but it’s dangerously misleading!
A short resume with generic content is a waste of time. However, a recruiter will happily invest more time in a longer resume with the right information.

A clear pattern to me was that longer (and well-written) resumes had the tendency to provide more useful details, whereas one-page CVs (albeit from qualified candidates) didn’t provide me with enough data to say “yes”.

Unfortunately, the topic of resume length is still widely misunderstood by candidates and clients of my resume writing service, which is why I’ve decided to settle the topic once and for all.

To understand why resume length matters less than you’ve been told, you need to know what actually happens to your resume after you send it.

First of all, the resume screen isn’t just one step, especially at competitive companies. It usually happens in 2 or 3 phases, like this:

• During step 1, recruiters perform quick screens from a long list of CVs. That first review is quick, which is where the stat on “10 seconds per resume” comes from. They make a first list of qualified candidates, by eliminating those who don’t fit requirements.
• Then (step 2), they will re-read those pre-selected resumes with a much deeper screen to find the best profiles.
• At top companies, there might even be a step 3, where the recruiter and hiring managers meet to discuss the candidate pipeline and create a shortlist for interviews. That means reviewing each resume again, this time with a discussion and argumentation to make a decision.

The reason I am telling you this is that even if a one-page resume may pass step 1 (because the profile has the right experience and credentials), it will tend to get rejected at step 2 or step 3 in comparison to other candidates. It’s almost always due to lack of content for recruiters and hiring managers to decide on.

Since I mentioned that the first screen happens fast, you might think that a one-page resume works better there, and that a longer CV gets in the way.
This is another argument I see everywhere online, but it isn’t true either.

Recruiters do not screen resumes from top to bottom, reading everything.
They review resumes the same way as you read a commercial website: they skim. Their eyes are used to find sections, keywords and the information that matters without them having to read everything. That’s enough for the first screen. To give you a visual representation of this, I built a small recruiter screen simulator app.

This means that the length of your resume barely impacts screening time.
By the way, this isn’t just based on my experience, but also a well-documented reader behavior, and a big part of the thesis for the design book “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug.

Now let’s talk about the screening steps that matter (Step 2 and Step 3).
Remember that at this stage, your resume needs to be better than other equally qualified candidates to win a callback.

Let’s put you in the recruiters’ shoes and read the 2 resume project blocks below. Both are describing the same project. Resume A is from a one-page resume optimized for space, and Resume B is from a two-page resume optimized for content.

Which one seems the most competent? Obviously Resume B.
Here’s the important point though: Resume B isn’t better because the candidate has a better profile or experience (remember, it’s the same project). Resume B gets chosen because it disregarded length and wrote about more duties, in more detail.

By the way, I have created an easy-to-follow methodology to write great bullet points like in the examples above: check it out if you need help with that.

No. There is no page limit in an Applicant Tracking System, and there is no scoring penalty for a second or a third page. The software parses text into fields. It does not care how much detail there is.

What an ATS does care about is whether it can read the text at all, which is a formatting question: tables, text boxes, images and two-column layouts are what make that ATS screen difficult. A clean three-page resume will work better than a cramped one-page resume built out of text boxes to make it fit.

If anything, a longer resume means more keywords for them to attach to your profile, so it tends to work in your favor.

Nearly everything written online about the topic of resume length, including most of what you just read, is somebody’s opinion… So what does the data say? Here’s the only piece of evidence on the topic, which (no surprises) confirms that longer resumes work better.

In 2018, ResumeGo ran a hiring simulation with 482 recruiters, hiring managers and executives. They screened 7,712 resumes for real openings, with the same candidate shown once on one page and once on two. Of the resumes that got picked, 5,375 were the two-page version.

Recruiters were 2.3 times more likely to choose the two-page resume. They also spent longer reading it. This confirms what I told you above: recruiters are perfectly fine investing screening time in a longer resume that answers their question, and more data means more reason to get shortlisted.

Even for juniors, their study showed that recruiters are still 1.4 times more likely to choose a two-page resume over a one-page resume for entry-level roles. So the advice stands for any seniority!

As I wrote in the beginning of this article, the one-page advice isn’t totally unfounded. It does come from feedback candidates heard.
The issue is that the feedback is misunderstood.

When a recruiter or a hiring manager tells you your resume is “too long” or “too wordy”, it doesn’t mean that it has too many pages. It means it includes too much useless content. Recruiters call that “fluff”.

Here’s an important notion, which I argue is becoming even worse in the age of AI. Recruiters (just like any content reader) do not want to waste time on useless information.

If you’ve used Claude or ChatGPT to generate resume content, you probably got long sentences that sounded more professional. Read them carefully: you’ll realize that half of the words do not carry any useful information.
That is what fluff is, and that’s what is getting you rejected.

A great resume needs to be written intentionally. This means making editorial choices (what to include or not), efficient syntax, and clear vocabulary. All single words used should provide information on duties, tools and techniques used, metric or impact. Whatever doesn’t bring value needs to go.

Let me show you resume fluff in action, with a couple of bullet point examples.

Example 1: too many words to say the same thing with less precision

Example 2: same length but less core information.

Now that you are (hopefully) convinced to let your resume flourish, here’s what to put on a two page resume. Besides the rewriting of your bullet points, as suggested above, there are a few key sections you can add which often are missing in one-page versions.

If you’ve requested your free CV review, you’ve probably noticed that your Profile Summary is the first thing I checked. A profile summary is crucial in helping you pass the first screen (Step 1, as described above) because it gives recruiters all the info they need within seconds. Now, you have the space for it :-)

During Step 2, recruiters spend most of their time on your most recent experience, which needs to cover the entire role profile for your target role. This job block should be longer than others, with 1 bullet point per core competency. That should give you anywhere between 6 and 10 bullet points (or longer if you are a manager), which is only possible with a longer resume.

If you’re in tech or in a creative role, and especially if you are a junior, projects make a huge difference because they allow you to prove skills that aren’t covered within your work experience. This is the single biggest reason a student or a career changer should not be on one page. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to score more points with hiring managers.

Now that you have more sections, you might be wondering about what comes first. The order in which you list your resume sections does have a small impact on CV screening outcomes, because your first page gets more views.
Think of it as the “above the fold” section of a website, or the first page of Google results.

This means our first page needs to include the sections that are most important to recruiters. That’s Profile Summary, Technical Skills, Education (*only for juniors), and your most recent Work Experience.
The rest can go to the 2nd page, and it will be read lightly during Step 2 or Step 3 of the screening process.

Now, is a 3 page resume too long? The answer is the same here: it is fine only if the content is useful. Most mid-career resumes can fit in 2 pages, but if you’ve changed jobs many times or if you have substantial experience, it is ok to have a 3 page resume. For seniors and managers, it’s often the case. Again, you should focus on writing impactful content and not worry about length, even if you end up with 3 pages.

Not if the third page is doing work. The same rule applies as page two: the question is never how many pages, it is whether the last thing on the last page still earns its place.

Where three pages genuinely is standard: academia, research, medicine, federal and government roles, and senior leadership with fifteen or twenty years behind them. In those cases a two-page resume looks like somebody left things out.

Where it usually is not: your first job, and any role where the third page is education, hobbies and a skills list that repeats what page one already said.

Roles in IT tend to demand more technical details. This often happens for the techies I write for, because engineers are evaluated based on the technical complexity and intricacies of their work. Technical resumes also need to show both engineering responsibilities and collaborative/leadership duties, which inevitably makes for more content. As a result, most of the resumes I write are 2 or 3 pages long.

2 pages, 3 pages, etc… In case you’re wondering if there is a ceiling to how many pages a resume can be, there is. I do encounter these regularly, with some CVs passing the 5/6 page mark. I’ve even seen 10-page CVs.

That’s indeed way too long, but for the same reason as argued above.
These resumes almost always include fluff and useless information.
Let’s take a closer look at these cases.

The most frequent pattern is a senior who has changed jobs many times.
As explained above, most of the screening decision is based on your most recent experience. The previous one or two experiences are secondary and should be focused on core achievements.
For what I call “legacy experiences” (jobs that are 10+ years old), you should summarise the mission in 1 bullet point. This will avoid long laundry lists that recruiters won’t read, and most likely will reduce the overall length of your resume considerably.

The other case I see a lot is someone who’s worked on many short-term contracts. This is a very common thing in tech, as well as in a few other industries, and it can make for lengthy descriptions.
Here’s how to solve this: instead of listing each contract as a separate job block, create one unique block per employer and list the different missions as one or two bullet points within it.

By employer, I mean either the agency that dispatched you, “Self-Employed”, or your own company name, depending on what the most logical common denominator is.

Internships are valued much less than regular work experience by recruiters.
It’s valuable content if you are entry level, so if you have more than 2 full-time jobs within your work experience, you can remove them. Again: if your resume is 2 pages and you have internships included, these can stay: they won’t impact you negatively.

Once you have secondary education (any degree after high school), any information before can be removed. Same goes for the coursework detail, which recruiters don’t care about.

Any information that doesn’t serve as proof for your skills on the job should go.
Recruiters and hiring managers do not care that you like baseball. However, they do care that your hobby is competitive programming if you are applying for an entry-level dev role. So choose wisely ;-)