At some point, should you go with a 2-page resume or cut as much as possible to get 1-page?
Posted by k032@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 83 comments
I'm around 10 years experienced as a developer. Technically I've had 6 jobs, but some longer than others (2 years, 4 years, 1 year, 6 months, and now my present title 3 months and on-going).
I like to keep my resume just perpetually updated as I go, not really job hunting, but I'm having a hard time not going beyond 1 page. I've started trimming my early experience down quite a bit.
Like heres a line on my first job out of college I thought to remove. "Developed RESTful APIs using Java and Spring Framework, and maintained legacy services built with Spring and J2EE, interfacing with Postgres/PostGIS databases."
Realistically, I haven't used Spring, Java, J2EE in like 8 years. Same with PostGIS. I actually got asked a question on it, and I basically had to say I didn't know it's been a long time.
But not sure if this is at my detriment, and maybe I should start just going to 2 pages. Thoughts?
metal_slime--A@reddit
I think the 2 page rule is the dumbest rule still commonly practiced today especially for devs.
Consider how many different technologies a dev is supposed to know
Then the number of platforms
And the skills they have to come equipped with
And the many buckets of experience that are required
And also that robust work history you have to carry to prove seniority
UX teaches us how important white space is. If your information density is so compressed they eye doesn't know where to look, that's just as illegible as a 10 page biography
It's not just about being concise. It's about keeping it legible and approachable.
luvsads@reddit
One-page is even more preferred by most hiring teams these days. With the rise of 1,000+ applicant pools and resume/application bots, HTs are spending less and less time reading through submissions.
Your resume needs to be an elevator pitch in order to effectively communicate why you're fit for the role while staying within the limits of the HTs attention span.
single_plum_floating@reddit
Your C.V is getting fed into a LLM either way. the difference between one or two pages after going through the killing floor is frankly irrelevant.
luvsads@reddit
I have never fed a candidates resume through an LLM and never will. Every hiring manager where I work operates the same way, too. I don't think you should assume they are, and even if you do, smaller resumes will give more accurate and faster LLM results due to smaller token/context size
sweetno@reddit
Yes, you can put a lot of stuff into the resume. That's why this rule exists: it's in your best interest to put there what the employer needs, and cut out the irrelevant parts so that they won't think you're not who they need. It would be concerning if they needed more than one page of skills, experiences etc.
metal_slime--A@reddit
Y'all don't seem to be grasping what I'm saying.
If you have 3 pages of info to present, then that's what you have to present.
But what most people do is they take that content (and it's all relevant) and they cram and squish it into a single page, turning it into an illegible wall of text.
Tada one page! But totally useless!
"But hey it meets the one page rule..."
UX teaches us this is simply BAD information architecture and poor presentation formatting.
Electronic_Funny5917@reddit
If you have 3 pages worth of resume I doubt all of that is going to be relevant to the job you are applying!
Say at 10 years of experience having your 1st internship is pointless on the resume, just condense it to a 1 page.
No one is reading a 3 page resume!
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
No one wants to read a 3 page resume just like no manager wants a long drawn out explanation. A 3 page resume would automatically go in the trash
metal_slime--A@reddit
It's like I type the words and they are not being read.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
What you typed reads as if you have to choose between 3 pages of content and 3 pages of squished content in one page.
You don’t need either. You need one page of nicely formatted content to sell yourself. I have all of my resumes since 2008 and even then I was looking for my 3rd job out of now 10 and I had 12 years worth of experience (or honestly 5 years worth of experience and 1 year of experience 7 times) and they have never been more than one page and I have never had any problems getting one or more offers within 3 weeks. That includes 2020, 2023 and 2024.
sar2120@reddit
The one page rule was only ever supposed to apply in your first 0-2 years of experience. It's wild that people are still doing it with experience. Tell your story. Shoot your shot!
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
30 years, 10 jobs, 6 within 10 years (will go down to 5 jobs in 10 years in November) - 1 page resume.
I found a job within 3 weeks of looking in 2016, 2018 , 2020, 2023, 2024
0vl223@reddit
And if you have to include information to get through AI/HR filtering a second page is perfect for that category. But page 1 should show your story for someone from the field.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
All of the technologies I claim to know and how I used them can easily fit on one page with my last 10 years of jobs that encompasses 6 jobs
athermop@reddit
Just because we legitimately have good and useful information to put in the resumes doesn't mean that we should put it in there. You're arguing from the supply side, but the constraint lives entirely on the demand side.
The deciding factor is the people reading the resume, not if we have information they should have. I mean, it's very likely they need more than one page to properly evaluate you. In a fair world, they would be reading and digesting all the valuable history you have.
The question is...are they?
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
Honestly, there’s no right answer. If you keep all your experience cut down so it fits, there’s “not enough detail”. If you leave it all, it’s too long. So you drop anything more than ten years old and they complain you didn’t include it. There’s literally no winning. Mine is 2 pages (1 front & back) with an offer at the end to send the full uncut version (which is like 10 pages at this point). You’d be surprised how many people request the uncut version even though they’d never look at a 10 page resume if you sent it up front.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
Absolutely no company cares I wrote C and Fortran on mainframes in the 90s, VB6, and Perl in the early 2000s, C and c# for ruggedized Windows CE devices in the late 2000s, etc.
The earliest they might care about is when I started with .Net Core in 2016.
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
And yet if you drop that experience they’ll ask you for it. 🤷🏻♂️
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
I have never once out of going through the process 9 times in 30 years had someone ask what I did over 10 years ago.
In fact I’ve had just the opposite. When I was asked during behavioral interview at BigTech, they asked did I have a more recent example
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
I have, on multiple occasions, been asked for my experience older than a decade when I left it out.
It’s almost like your experience is not universal.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
Because of agism is real, I don’t put the year I graduated on my resume. As far as they know I’m in my mid 30s.
I also go in clean shaven with a bald head. No one can tell how old I am.
It might also be the lotion like Bill Burr said
https://youtu.be/RiH-_ZUILk0?si=oVjDFy8hXomi_Urd
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
I honestly have no idea how we went from topic A to topic B here, but I’m kind of done with you. Seems like you just want to argue with a stranger and that’s not my bag baby.
Tman1677@reddit
What?
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
I have no idea how this dude went from the topic at hand to ageism. It seems like they’re just interested in arguing, which I’m uninterested in.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
Because when you put 30 years of experience on your resume they know you’re probably in your 50s?
Why on Gods green earth would I put on my resume that I programmed in FORTRAN and C on DEC Mainframes??
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
Ok. I understand how we got from A to B now, but it’s still not real relevant to what I posted. Again, it seems like you really just want to argue and… I don’t care to.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
So having more experience on your resume doesn’t give away your age is not a valid concern for “experienced developers”?
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
I’m blocking you. For the last time, I have no interest in arguing with you.
sharpcoder29@reddit
The only time they ask is for background checks and thats 10 years
Hot-Profession4091@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/s/HZmrLMiWDc
musty_mage@reddit
Well I'm just starting a new assignment with PL/I as the main language. They definitely care that I used to write cobol, fortran and assembler in ages past.
Endur@reddit
This is also what I've found. People will tell you conflicting advice. Have both ready
3pieceSuit@reddit
12 YOE, I tailor a resume to each application (highlighting only relevant skills) and folliw a strict 1 page rule.
Always served me well. My last hiring manager (now my manager because I got the role) even commended me on the 1 pager and said it was nice to see against the reams of slop he has to wade through.
MisterHyman@reddit
With AI wouldn't you argue more is better?
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
If you are hoping to stand out from the literally hundreds of applications for any job req based on randomly spamming ATS’s, you e already lost.
I looked for a job in both 2023 and 2024 both times:
Existing_Station9336@reddit
A typical recruiter receives tens if not hundreds of CVs and reviewing CVs is only one of the many work tasks they have to do on a given day/week.
Imagine I've sent you a role description that we're hiring for and then 50 CVs to review for it. You have max 2 hours to review all of them. Will you waste your time reading every single word in very long CVs?
allllusernamestaken@reddit
they were never doing that. Remember in the old days we were told to put the "skills" section up top so the recruiter can quickly spot a few keywords?
Then ATS came along and ranked based on keyword matches.
Now they dump it into AI but depending on how they're prompting it, it could be keyword matches or more detailed "grade against this job description" prompts.
GrowthProfitGrofit@reddit
From what I've seen it seems like recruiters now just feed the CV into AI and don't bother reading it themselves. I think even before the AI era they were mostly just skimming for keywords.
I keep mine down to 1 page but mostly just as an exercise in message discipline. I think in practice 2 pages may just be better these days. Just don't exceed 2 pages because it makes you look sloppy.
sar2120@reddit
Remember, you have to get through the whole hiring pipeline, not just step 1. The recruiter may not read past the top half of the first page, but when you get to tech screen, you want to show off all that you know. For an experienced dev, a one page resume is a bad choice. If you're fresh out of college, one page.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
“all I know” includes 65C02 assembly on Apple //e, C and Fortran on mainframes, Perl, VB6, Classic ASP, IIS on Windows NT, C# compact framework, Java Server Faces, C++ MFC and DCOM, .Net Framework, etc.
Absolutely nothing I did before 2016-2018 is relevant in today’s job market
Groove-Theory@reddit
2 pages is totally fine. Rejection rates are similar for both 1 and 2 pages.
If you have 2 pages, make sure your most relevant positions/skills are on the first page and youre ok.
actionerror@reddit
I split my resume into two parts, a detailed explanation of roles per company within the past 10 years, then just a prior experience section highlighting older experiences. Still limiting it to two pages though cuz who wants to read 8 pages’ worth of experience?
teomees@reddit
Mine is a 2-page one and it doesn't suck at passing screenings.
First page: Full name, title, a short introduction, my objective-strengths-achievements, tech stack/skills, languages I speak
Second page: Experiences with a little bit of details and education (BSc + MSc)
Don't forget to tailor it with AI with some keywords, because HRs and recruiters use AI to parse them. And don't touch upon anything you have not used for ages or you rarely use in the resume.
TheCritFisher@reddit
Two pages, no one reads them until the actual interviews now. All screening is done by AI.
As an engineering interviewer, I'd rather see the full two pages with history.
But that's just my opinion. But I can say MOST candidates we hired had two pages. This is in fintech where lots of ex-FAANG and adjacent would apply.
Mael5trom@reddit
It should be as short as possible while being as long as it needs to be to accurately convey the information needed for the job you are applying for to consider you a good candid and move you on to the interview stage.
Also, instead of short, succinct is a better description of what you are going for.
Have a base, but adjust it for the job you're applying for. If a job doesn't really apply, cut it down it down to just the basics and anything especially interesting or that validates your skills. One that matches up well, add some more details that show you are their candidate.
CubicleHermit@reddit
I've been two pages since about your point in my career. When it first spilled over, all of my work experience was on page 1, and page 2 was just half the page for papers, education, and the skills block for ATS to keyword match on.
Having said that - even today with 26 years of career and a full second page - I don't expect that most humans are going to read the second page, or if they do, it's scanning just to see the employer names and "where did this dude go to college."
The EM version of my resume is literally just my last job on the first page, and the second page is barely more than one bullet per employer.
Fit_Gain840@reddit
HR uses AI to go through CVs, so make sure you provide a good context to AI.
thisismyfavoritename@reddit
1 page tailored to the job
Phanatic@reddit
At 24 years experience, I keep my resume down to one page and a link to my personal website to see the detailed resume. I spent the first 10 years at the same place so I compressed that down into 2 lines just listing the teams I worked on. At this point, I think a lot of resumes are just read by ATS anyway, and interviewers show up with cliff notes of your resume.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
People barely read a one page resume. Every opening gets hundreds of applications. No one is going to go to your website. These days if you are blindly submitting your resume to an ATS, you’ve already lost.
I don’t look at resumes at all when I interview these days. I’m in the pool of third round interviewers. By the time they get to me, they’ve already met the technical bar. I’m doing behavioral/architectural interviews
xXxdethl0rdxXx@reddit
That's all very interesting, but resumes are still a required part of the process (even for a direct referral) so this is a completely unhelpful comment.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
Yes resumes are part of the process - to get pass HR as the original poster said
I’m saying that a two or three page resume doesn’t help once you get past the HR screen
eled_@reddit
To each their own, I make a point of trying to understand who I'll be interviewing.
Most of it we try to bake into our process, some of it is just me reading the resume and eventually checking on their github or website if they have one. It it turns out the resume / others are utter crap then I won't delve too far, but it's info in and of itself.
Of course I can afford to do that because I'll have at most 2-3 max in a week, if we need to interview a lot of people we try to spread the load.
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
First I absolutely refuse to be part of the toxic culture where software developers think they should have to do side projects outside of work.
But the rest is really not that hard
“Tell me about a project that you are most proud of” and dig into it and ask them what was their level of involvement, choices they made, tradeoffs, gauge their level of being able to handle ambiguity, complexity, their real world system design experience etc not what they memorized from DDIA
“I see you have been working for awhile. If you could go back and tell your less experienced self to do something different, what would it be?”
“tell me about time you had to ramp up on a new to you technology quickly for a project”
“say you are in the room with me as your lead, my manager and the director, and we say something that from your experience you know is completely stupid, what do you do?”
follow up question. “What if we say we heard you but still decided to go in the original direction”
Notice no leetcode, no techno trivia etc. Too many companies act like their yet another CRUD app or enterprise SaaS app needs someone who is a rockstar developer who can reverse a b tree on the whiteboard blindfolded while riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
U_L_Uus@reddit
How do you do it for your personal resume?, if you do not mind me asking. I have been pondering the same thing as OP and I am contemplating that as an option, but the works behind it kind of beffudle me. Should I go for self-hosting, seek something like an AWS, ...
Phanatic@reddit
I keep my personal site on GitHub pages, having worked there for a while. Free, easy to setup and I can write blog posts in markdown.
jambalaya004@reddit
I can’t speak for op, but I have been using cloudflare pages recently for static content. Firebase and GitHub pages are solid options as well. All are free.
chicknfly@reddit
If there’s one thing you can learn from this thread is that there’s no correct answer.
Now, I’m feeling left out, so I’m going to give you my own experience. I couldn’t land a job for 18 months. I had a handful of places that invited me to at least one interview for those places that did, I had a two page résumé. I had only relevant jobs in my work history with at least two bullet points and one with five (those experiences were across the spectrum of skills). Each bullet point took took no more than two lines of space. No goofy bolding of keywords or other strange formatting or font. Comfortable use of white space. Little to no adverbs. Treated my first word of a bullet point similar to the first sentence of a paragraph — you can read it and already have an idea of what the rest of that text block says.
Format:
rover_G@reddit
Keep notes on all your experiences. Tailor your resume to the job hunt.
AnnoyedVelociraptor@reddit
Eh, trim accordingly. I don't want that 6 month stint 5 years ago in Sharepoint to show up.
backwardclock@reddit
I don't read past the first page.
TurboBerries@reddit
I keep page 1 a short and sweet summary of all my experience, education, volunteering etc. Basically what team was i on or what product i built, what my role was, overall business impact if any, and tech used.
Pages 2+ are detailed dive deep pages for each company/team. Actual bullet points of what i did and the impact, any notable accomplishments, anything that defines my role and supports it e.g tech lead. I dont expect anyone to read past page 1 except the hiring manager. Its for the people who want to know more or have doubts about if im qualified. It also serves as a logbook of what ive done because if someone asked me about my time at my past companies i would have a hard time remembering so i just refer to my resume as the source of truth. I also have personal projects at the end. My resume at this point is like 8 pages small margin, small font. Only people who ever had issues with it is the recruiters. The tech teams reviewing it seemed to have appreciated it and liked to dive deep on bullet points on pages 2+.
addys@reddit
Mine is 2 pages but all the important stuff is in the top half of the first page. everything else is optional. 25+ yoe
BraveResearcher3037@reddit
I have 30 years experience, 10 jobs and my resume is one page long. I don’t put anything on my resume I don’t want to talk about.
beefz0r@reddit
I do interviews every now and then and I don't read resumes fully anymore. It's all heavily fluffed up with AI and the interview turns out to be a trainwreck.
If it's short and honest I'm more inclined to believe it. But it's really hard now to do a pre-selection based on resume.
pumpernick3l@reddit
Recruiter: two page if you’re senior. I want to read through all of the details of everything you did, because my hiring manager sure as hell will ask me about it.
gemengelage@reddit
Disclaimer: depends on the culture of your regional job market.
But where I am, a lot do people think that their cv should fit on a single page because that's what they were taught in school and in college. I've talked to a lot of recruiters and I've come to the conclusion that limiting your cv to one page makes perfect sense under one condition: you are fresh out of college.
Someone with experience should need more than one page. Make it skimmable, put a short summary at the top and believe me, 80% of recruiters will stop reading after your second most recent job anyway. But there are a lot of recruiters who dislike a resume that leaves things out just to fit on one page.
Trick-Interaction396@reddit
No one is even looking at page 2
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
I have 12 years. My early jobs don’t have any details in them because it’s not necessary. I have the last 5ish years well documented. I don’t have any extra like projects or socials sections.
I keep it to a page unless I’m trying to modify it for something very specific.
However, I have a level of bias that I almost never send it out cold so that likes means some differences.
I have explicitly removed skills from my LinkedIn. Not because they are from long ago but because I don’t have any interest in jobs using them. The most common thing I scrubbed is anything related to Ruby on Rails. I mention react but I downplay it greatly.
All of this is of course dependent on having a lot of options. Which I personally am lucky to have.
tsroelae@reddit
I have used a two page resume since attending University. And am using a three page resume now. One page is experience and education. One is skills. And I have a third page with two recent projects that highlight my skills.
It nicely illustrates how I have a UX background and how I transitioned into engineering. I only ever applied very selectively and with that had a 50% response rate.
So lange nger resukes can absoluety work, but they have to be extremely scannable by humans.
tmclaugh@reddit
Biggest problem I’m having trimming mine down is for each bullet point I list what I did plus it’s impact. Quantifiable impact wherever possible.
>Developed new RESTful API s using Java and Spring Framework, and maintained legacy services built with Spring and J2EE, interfacing with Postgres/PostGIS databases.
Would become this for me.
>Developed RESTful API in Java for XYZ purpose. This lead to A, B, and C outcomes.
My bullet points are light on technology and heavy on impact. Frequently a one or two line bullet becomes three or four lines.
This approach actually comes from when I would do resume filtering for roles. The higher you go in your career the more you should understand impact. So when looking at a large queue of resumes the broadest and easiest filter I could apply was rejecting any resume that read as, “I showed up to work and did stuff.”
Haven’t started applying yet so not sure how this is going to affect me.
jake_morrison@reddit
The key point is that you need to get the attention of someone who is skimming through a bunch of resumes and make them think “this matches what I am looking for”.
Your resume should be tailored for the role that you are applying for and list bullet points showing that you are a good match. They will look at your current position and see what you are doing now and what you did, again bullets.
Beyond that, it could be 10 pages if they are actually interested. Trying to condense a lot of experience into one page often results in completely generic descriptions of the work. Better to have more detail.
It’s important to have a clear narrative and not be confusing. If they can’t figure out “what you do”, they move on. So it’s better to be streamlined and matching the job you are applying for.
mq2thez@reddit
I’m at 16 YOE and just had to update my resume. I still keep it to one page. Older entries get trimmed or adjusted to emphasize certain things.
originalchronoguy@reddit
3 pagers and I have a good hit/response rate
Endur@reddit
I had a few recruiters tell me to go to 2 pages and I was getting plenty of interviews, but then again, that resume was likely getting past the first funnel b/c of the recruiter. I personally felt a lot better about my resume at 2 pages. Don't put anything on there that you don't want to talk about, you never know what the interviewer is going to be interested in
ZukowskiHardware@reddit
I always go one page
sar2120@reddit
It doesn't matter. I complained to the recruiter once about a 6 page resume and was chewed out for caring about something that doesn't matter.
1 or 2 pages, nobody will care. Just make sure the first half of the first page makes your case
obelix_dogmatix@reddit
Noone is pedantic about 1 page resumes these days. The only exceptions are Finance and Business Consulting.
randomInterest92@reddit
People who read resumes do not have time. Imagine you had to sift through 50 resumes every day while also doing all your other work. Even if you spend just 2 minute on each, it's already about an hour of work.
As someone who has seens 500+ resumes and has hired 10+ engineers in the last year, please minimize it down to the most essential information that fits the job.
I do not care if you programmed a pet app in swift 10 years ago if all our company does is CRUD webapps.
Also i don't care that you were a dj for 3 years or did an intermittent year at McDonald's to learn "teamwork under high pressure"
Just name a few things that you think fit the job and keep everything else minimal or straight up scratch it
ISDuffy@reddit
Keep it to one page, you can have a LinkedIn profile or website to describe the rest.
Your CV is likely the first impression someone hiring has of you, but these people are reading possibly 100 CVs, so you best getting to the point.
I have a two column layout for mine:
Left - basic information, education, main skills and interests.
Right - overview of me, and list of my experience.
Xavenne@reddit
I used to have a single page resume, but eventually turned it into two pages because I felt cramming it all into one page wasn't giving a good overview of my experiences. Half of the second page is now a "notable projects" section, with short summaries of projects that highlight my contributions and most notable outputs. This also means I can keep my job history relatively compact.
It works well for me and I've never had issues getting interviews.
Kuresov@reddit
I literally just list title, company, and dates for anything more than 5-6 years ago. 11 YOE 1 page resume.
tomqmasters@reddit
People tell me that the two page resume + portfolio makes their eyes bleed.