How Long Should My Resume Be?
The short answer: It depends, but it's not as important as you think.
Resume length doesn't matter (that much)
You've probably asked yourself this question a thousand times. More than 1 page? Is 3 pages too much?
Here's the first thing I want you to understand: despite what your career counselor told you or what you've read online... There is no absolute "rule" and recruiters don't care.
But... there's no smoke without fire. If you receive negative feedback about length, it's more about the content than the word count.
It's all about cutting the 🐂💩
A resume is judged "too long" when there are too many words for too little substance.
What DOESN'T Work
A 2 or 3-page resume full of fluff and meaningless buzzwords. If you've done little and write half a page about it, you'll annoy the recruiter.
What DOES Work
Writing about topics recruiters care about. In that case, they'll want more details! If your content is good, it doesn't matter if it takes 2 or 3 pages.
Recruiters have laser vision
"I was told recruiters only spend 10 seconds on a resume, so if it's long they won't read it, right?"
Secret: Recruiters are so used to scanning resumes (100+ per day) that they are extremely good at tagging key information. They have a better response time than your last Node.js app.
Basically, they don't read top to bottom. They scan. So length barely impacts review time. What matters is not diluting good content in a sea of irrelevant text.
Dear CS student, you are different
(Yes, mom was right). This is especially true for Juniors or Computer Science students.
Despite what your career counselor told you, your resume should probably be more than 1 page. Why? Because you've worked on projects.
Those projects ARE work experience.
That Netflix clone or that Sentiment Analysis model count. And you need to talk about architecture patterns, libraries, metrics, testing, and deployment. That takes space. And that's okay.
Be Different: The Comparison
Resume A is what 95% of people do. Resume B is what you'll do.
The Basic (1 page)
The Pro (Detailed)
• Engineered a ticket management web application... using Node.js, integrating an event-driven architecture... achieving a 50% reduction in ticket resolution time.
• Conducted thorough requirements analysis... created a detailed design document featuring UML diagrams...
• Created a suite of Unit and Integration tests with Jest and E2E tests with Cypress... ensuring code coverage of 85%.
• Deployed scalable infrastructure using Docker/K8s, implementing microservices... enabling 99.99% availability.
Which one seems more knowledgeable?
Use the space to write in detail. Content is king.
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