How Long Should a Resume Be?

Length follows evidence, not years

Someone with fifteen years of experience and one page of relevant evidence should send one page. Someone with eight years spanning two deep, relevant roles may genuinely need two. Counting years to pick a page count gets the logic backwards.

Recruiters skim. The practical cost of a second page isn't that it exists, it's that weak material on it dilutes the strong material everywhere else. A tight single page almost always reads better than a padded pair.

When one page is the right call

Early career, a focused search within one role family, or a career change where the older experience mostly doesn't transfer: one page. If you find yourself stretching content to fill it, that's the document telling you to stop.

• Under roughly ten years in one coherent track.
• Career changers whose old evidence doesn't support the new target.
• Any search where the strongest material fits comfortably on one page.

When two pages earn their keep

Senior and staff-level candidates, people with genuine breadth across systems or markets, and roles where scope itself is the qualification often need the room. The test stays the same: page two must hold evidence the target role actually values, not a museum of everything you've ever done.

If you use two pages, front-load them. Put the strongest, most recent, most relevant material on page one, because plenty of readers never reach page two, and the ones who do have already formed an opinion.

Cut by relevance, not just by age

The usual advice says trim the oldest roles first. Usually right, sometimes wrong. A ten-year-old role that proves exactly what the posting asks for beats a recent role that proves nothing relevant. Cut the bullet that repeats a point you've already made. Cut the tool you used once in 2019. Cut the internship once your professional history says more.

Older roles can collapse into a single line each: employer, title, dates. That keeps the career arc visible without spending space on details nobody will read.

Don't fake it with formatting

Eight-point fonts, hairline margins, and deleted white space technically shorten a resume while making it worse to read on screen and worse when parsed. If the only way to hit one page is to make the document hostile, the problem is the content, and the fix is cutting, not compressing.