As a certified and award-winning resume writer, I face this dilemma on a daily basis. Most resumes contain a lot of "fat" in the form of run-on sentences, unwieldy skill descriptions, lackluster branding, and unnecessary details. By trimming these problem areas, your resume can become a lean, mean, brand communication machine.
Let's take a look at a few length targets to give you an idea where your resume is out of balance. While there are few hard and fast resume rules, these are general guidelines that most highly experienced and credentialed writers and career coaches follow.
Resume & Content Length Guidelines
Resume Length
Most recruiters expect resumes to be two to three pages in length, with a strong preference for two pages in North America. While this varies from recruiter to recruiter, most like to see two-page resumes for job seekers with up to 10-15 years of experience. For those with considerably more experience, a three-page resume may be necessary to capture and present all relevant details.
One-Page Resume Rule
There is (and never has been) a one-page-only resume rule, though. Those with limited experience may find that length most appropriate for their needs.
Career Summaries
Career summary statements have shortened since the 2008 recession and now trend at three to six lines of text. In mid-career, mid-management, and executive resumes, it is often appropriate to add branding content to this section of the resume, though generally such material is best restricted to up to the first half of the document's first page. Work It Daily recommends ditching the career summary entirely and focusing on a headline instead—a short summary of the problem you solve that highlights your personal brand.
Core Competencies
Core competency sections are best limited to six to eight skills. At Work It Daily, we call this the "Experience Summary," which is a list of any skills and requirements you possess that are needed for a certain job and are relevant to the position you're applying for.
Bullets Per Role
Too many bulleted statements in a resume overwhelm your reader. Limit bullets to five per role if possible, but don't list fewer than three, either.
Bullet Length
Ideally, bullets should be limited to two lines of space. If additional critical details must be included, consider separating content into different bullets.
Amount of Work History to Include
Recruiters typically are most interested in the last 10-15 years of your experience, so this is the amount of experience you will want to profile on your resume. Older relevant experience can be briefly summarized in your "Additional Experience" section at the end of your resume. In most cases, any irrelevant work experience can be safely eliminated altogether. The usual exception is recent college grads and young professionals just starting out their careers who already have limited work experience to quantify and show off.
Resume Shortening Strategies
1. Say More with Less
Cut out words that aren't needed and delete words that are repeated. When you're fighting a two-line bullet length, every word counts.
2. Leverage Action Verbs
While all verbs convey action of some sort, some contain more energy and action than others. It may be accurate to say you wrote the company's five-year plan, for example, but it's more powerful to say that you strategized, authored, and executed the company's first-ever five-year plan.
3. Eliminate Passive Language
Passive language on a resume masks the true role you played in the task you're describing. The sentence, "I was exposed to different cultures, people, and challenges" is weaker than, "Gained cross-functional and cross-cultural exposure to 5 ethnicities in 12 countries," for example.
4. Be Specific
Avoid vague descriptors and phrases such as "a variety of," "many," "others," and "successfully." Replace them with specific details that add value and meaning to the text.
5. Use Numbers Whenever Possible
Numbers talk, so it's imperative to use them in resumes to quantify key achievements and context information. Don't tell your reader that you exceeded sales targets. Show them how much you surpassed goals year-over-year. Every bullet point under your "Work History" section should contain at least one number. If you only follow one tip in this article, this should be the one.
6. Reformat
Many old-style resumes and built-in MS Word templates don't use the most effective format to get a hiring manager's attention. In your resume, make sure you're using a clean, 11-18 pt. font (Arial, Calibri). Also, don't shrink your margins to fit more text on a page. This will sacrifice white space and make your resume harder to read. Finally, place your titles and employer names on one line if you held only one role with the company, and eradicate widows and orphans (stray paragraph lines and single words on a line by themselves).
7. Categorize
Some content can be categorized or sub-categorized to convey information in more powerful ways. Subdividing a long series of bullets, say, into three to four categories that emphasize the cross-functionality of your skill set will not only make your achievements easier to read, but it will also showcase your multi-function brand while adding industry-specific keywords to the resume.
8. Contextualize
Give your readers the right quality and type of detail to help them understand the full scope of your impact. For instance, if you turned around an operation, that's a critical accomplishment to include. But including before and after context details will automatically strengthen the presentation. How much money was the business losing per month or year prior to your tenure? How much profit or revenue was it generating by the time you left?
9. Focus on Results
In real estate, it's location, location, location that is critical; in resumes, it's achievements, achievements, achievements. Numerically quantified statements communicate volumes of information in fewer words while conveying your accomplishment in specific, measurable terms. Here's a sentence from a client's original resume: "Managed multimillion dollars business and IT initiatives from inception to implementation to increase productivity, reduce operational cost, and improve service quality by collaborating with IT staff, C-level executives, business users, and external healthcare service providers." Here's a revamp that shortens the sentence from 35 to 25 words while adding content to dramatically improve its results focus: "Ramped productivity 15%, cut operational costs $7M, and strengthened service quality 14%, leading $25M to $50M cross-functional business and IT initiatives from inception to rollout." Notice that the original bullet spanned three lines while the revamp needs just two.
10. Ditch Extraneous Details
Choose carefully which details you include and how you do so. For example, in the original client sentence included in the prior bullet, you'll find a list of folks this person collaborated with in his position. The results he achieved are more central to his brand so I substituted the word "cross-functional" to cover my client's list of four groups that required 11 words to describe. A distinction that underlines many of the above points is to recognize the difference between resume content that is important versus that which is critical to include.
There simply isn't room for all of your skills and entire work history on a resume, so sooner or later you have to choose which important details are must-haves. By following the 10 tips above, you'll know exactly what to include and omit so you can successfully condense your resume without losing value.
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This post was originally published at an earlier date.
By CAREEREALISM Founder, J.T. O'Donnell
3.2M students graduated from college this spring, but less than 25% of them had job offers. So, what happens to all the rest?
They go back home.
Referred to as 'boomerang kids' for their return to their parent's abode after graduation, this summer, a large percentage of 20'somethings will find themselves on the couch becoming K.I.P.P.E.R.S. (Kids In Parents Pockets Eating Retirement Savings). It's no wonder why so many parents are over-stepping their bounds in an effort to get their children jobs. However, continuing to micro-manage a student's life after college:
A) Won't help them learn how to take care of themselves.
B) Doesn't do much for their self-esteem.
Which means, parents need to stop hovering and start pointing their child towards resources that will teach their child how to find a job on their own.
Two Current Options for Job Seeking Grads
One option is their college career center. But, if the school isn't local, they may find this resource a dead end. Another option is to invest in private career coaching - a great service, if you can afford it.
Now, Here's a Third...
At CAREEREALISM.com, we just launched the 2.o version of our 24/7 Career Center, called CAREEREALISM Club. Staffed with approved career experts who work with members in real-time, the program provides job seekers with an unprecedented amount of cutting-edge career tools and job search support. As a top 10 career advice site, we knew we needed to create a 'Career HMO' for job seekers. This tool has the capacity to cut a job seeker's search time in half by providing the type of inspiration, education and connection needed to land a job in today's economy.
Plus, Exclusive Access to Our Talent Promotion Program
To celebrate it's launch, we are discounting 100 memberships for recent college grads to join our CAREEREALISM Club. Besides access to our tools and resources, we offer a program called CAREEREALISM University. Recent grads who join and complete CAREEREALISM University can earn a certification that shows employers their readiness for work. Better still, when they complete the certification, they get invited to join an exclusive group on LinkedIn (the #1 career social network) where we will help them connect with potential employers. In short, it's the chance for a recent grad to learn the vital life skills of job search, earning them a job in the process.
Our Desire for WOMP = Special Deal for Grads
The first 100 students who join here can do so for a one-time fee of $39. (The normal cost is $75/year.) Why are we doing this? Because we want to be able to show how powerful our program is. Instead of wasting money on advertising, we think it's smarter to offer this discount to a small group of eager job seekers as a way to create WOMP (Word Of Mouth Potential) for our innovative program.
If you know a college student who would benefit from this service, please send them the link. We can only afford to offer this price to the first 100 students who apply. We will shut down the link when we have reached that number, at which point, they can still join, but at the $75/year rate.
And, if you have any questions about the program, they can be e-mailed to us at club@workitdaily.com.
