<p>I was just wondering about how long a college senior's resume should be or if it matters if it's a little over a page. </p>
<p>I keep hearing and reading that everything should fit on one page but I'm having a lot of trouble getting that to work out.</p>
<p>If you can’t get everything to fit on one page, you have information in your resume that isn’t all that helpful. Your resume should be very much to-the-point. Find the bullet points that add less and take them out; if you have a bullet point that extends to three or more lines, rephrase it to make it take up less room. That job you had freshman year scooping ice cream? Perfect in the past, when you were applying to different jobs. Now, if you have had a couple of other jobs more recently, they are more important and more relevant, so that freshman year job can go away.</p>
<p>If you’d like, I’d be happy to review and critique your resume. :)</p>
<p>sxtech, do not give your resume to chrsw. He is one of those bleeding heart types. </p>
<p>You may have heard that your r</p>
<p>so… since a college senior doesn’t have 5 years of experience, the OP’s should be 1 page, no?</p>
<p>sxtech… I would go for one page. You can play with the margins if that helps. You probably have stuff on there that you don’t need.</p>
<p>Yeah don’t feed the ■■■■■. Resumes = 1 page, plain and simple. CVs can be longer when you have the requisite experience, but resumes are 1 page.</p>
<p>If this is for a position in the US, it absolutely cannot be longer than a page.</p>
<p>I’ve never really heard anyone support the idea that it can be more than 1 page. Even on the internet the general idea is no more than 1 page.</p>
<p>I would break your resume down into 5 sections…education, employment, extracurriculars, volunteering/community service, awards/honors. That’s just a suggestion though. Do what fits you.</p>
<p>My state (I think it’s my state? it might just be in my county though but I’m pretty sure it’s my entire state) requires that all high school seniors learn how to write a resume and then actually write one about themselves (we also have to learn to write and then do a cover letter, college essay and some other stuff). It’s actually pretty sweet that we do it because I would have no clue how to write a resume if it weren’t for that. I had a professor for one of the college classes I took who offered to critique our resumes. I gave him the one I had done for school and he really thought highly of it. I guess what I’m trying to say is to have someone from your school look over it too! Or at least someone who deals with resumes on a frequent basis.</p>
<p>Shorter is always easier to read. In my opinion 1 page rule is important when imagine a recruiter with hundred’s of them to read.</p>
<p>What about a soon-to-be college graduate that has 5+ years of work experience before they started school? So for the past 10 years they’ve been working full-time at relevant jobs, going to school, or taking part in internships. Would it be breaking the ‘rule of thumb’ of the 1 pager, or would 2 pages be acceptable in this case?</p>
<p>What types of full-time jobs have you done that are relevant?
With the exception of military or the equivalent, I can’t really think of that many jobs that are relevant to what you would be doing post grad that you started without a college degree.</p>
<p>The answer is still most likely no, though.
Also, this may be different for less conservative industries.</p>
<p>As a college senior with a lot of work experience, 1 page is still the general rule unless you have talked to the company recruiter himself and he/she says otherwise. Don’t list everything - list your top 4-5 jobs under employment (the ones that are most relevant to the job description at hand), maybe 1 leadership or volunteer position in a student club, and 1-2 important awards. I personally have multiple 1 pg. resumes…tailored to each purpose (1 for political risk analysis, 1 for international security/government, 1 for economics focus etc.). I also add a bulletin depending on what job it is to summarize my overall work experience - 5 years customer service/program planning that may not be reflected in other parts of my resume. Finally, don’t forget that you can always bring up work experience that isn’t in your resume in your cover letter or once you get an interview.</p>
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This would be exactly the case. Military enlistment which involved a lot of different roles, tasks, and responsibilities over 4 years (which can be argued is more like 8 years exp since the “work” week consisted of almost 24/7, or a sporadic schedule thereof), and also included points of leadership and individual awards recognition. If placing that, my work after the military (been out for 2 years now and for which I have landed my current work with a 2 page resume), and the internships during school on my resume takes up more than 1 page, then should I fit it to 1 page even if it means leaving out some of those key points that may make me stand out from other applicants?</p>
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Unless I typed in 8 pt font, it doesn’t seem feasible to fit those items and be able to expound upon them (for example, list Job A and underneath type a few bullet points of tasks performed or goals accomplished through that job) and still keep it to 1 page. I take it to accomplish that I would need to acompany multiple data on the same line (for example, Job A position title, company working for, dates of employment, and if the opening asks, prior wage all together on the same line)?</p>
<p>So I just did this: I left only 3 section on the resume - Experience, Education, and Awards/Achievements. 4 Experience entries, 1 education entry, anf 4 lines of awards entries. Everything was typed in 10 font, only one line was used for company, location, position title, and dates of employment. 5 bullet points (or less) for each position at 2 lines of type (or less) for each bullet describing tasks performed for each experience entry (job). 1 line for education (besides the title EDUCATION). 5 lines of contact info at the top (address, 2 phone numbers, email address). All of this and still it is just over 1 page (about 1 1/4). All of it is directed to a specific type of job posting - say, administrative in nature. No objective was input (I’m told those are outdated anyway) and no Summary of Skills towards the top.</p>
<p>Should some of the bullet points still be cut until I have only 1 page even if this leaves ony 1-2 points under each experience entry and may not reflect in whole what was done or accomplished there?</p>
<p>turtlerock - IMO, you can go to 1.5/2 pages since you have held multiple positions of (presumably) increasing responsibility. That said, if you have bullets under each position that aren’t unique, you might want to just list them one time. Just as an example, if you answered phones for your office in each job, IMO that is not important enough to list for each job. Just list it once. That said, again, I think you have the work experience to justify going over 1 page.</p>
<p>Also, federal government resumes can be very, very long through the usajobs process or other online applications.</p>
<p>Personally, I have one job and four internships on my resume… they vary from 2-4 bullets each. I also have 3 leadership positions (1-2 bullets each), 5 awards (no bullets, explanation on the same line), general skills, and education. I fudged the margins to make it fit on one page.</p>
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Ah-ha! That’s what I can do too.</p>
<p>
That’s a good suggestion. I didn’t notice until you mentioned it, but there may be one or two points that are repeated in another entry.</p>
<p>With the above it seems to crunch just to one page. Haha! Awesome to be able to do though. Just in case.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input, all.</p>
<p>Again, I suggest taking a look at your resume and deciding what the most important points are. 10pt font and narrow margins are all fine; so is making the information section (your name, address, etc) smaller. You want every bullet point on your resume to add something. The fact that you have the problem of TOO MUCH is fantastic since it means you can really focus your resume on your strengths.</p>
<p>Read over all of your bullet points, but read from bottom to top (this will give you a fresher perspective). If you find that ANY of those points are weak or just filler, consider either removing them or combining them with other points; get someone else to read over it for you, as well (again, I’m happy to do it), since it’s always good to get multiple opinions. </p>
<p>At the end of the day, you should have a resume that details your most important accomplishments. When I was creating my resume, I found it difficult to leave off some of my work experience, especially stuff that really shaped me as an employee, but it was necessary to choose the most relevant experience and only the most important details. As I said earlier, absolutely do not extend beyond one page - no matter how much experience you have, you should be able to explain it in a page; as you get more experienced, it will become more impressive to potential employers when you are able to succinctly summarize your professional history in a single page, and your resume will become even more powerful.</p>
<p>The thing I found useful was playing around with font size, as well. For sections that were mostly listing things (technical skills, courses TAed, publications, etc) I used a slightly smaller font, while for more important things such as projects and responsibilities I use a larger one since that’s what I really want attention drawn to.</p>
<p>I would not worry if you go to 2 pages. The days of having to keep a resume to one page went the way of bond paper resumes.<br>
If the key points that you want to make are there and it runs 2 pages that will be OK. It is more important that it reads decently than if you hack it to pieces just to make it one page. Some of the one page resumes that I have been reading recently are so pared down to try to fit them onto one page that they are almost unintelligible.</p>