Many of you are diligently working on updating your resume in hopes of finding a new career opportunity. You start adding all your unique skills and updating your work experience, and suddenly, you are running out of space on that one-page resume. So, you begin to think, should my resume be on one page? The short answer is, no, it can surpass one page in length. A one-page resume is one of the biggest resume myths out there – here’s why.
Emphasis on skills and resume objective
In 2021, candidates should emphasize their skills (both soft and hard) and possibly add a resume objective. 2020 was a crazy year, and many of you will have a job search story to tell. An easy way to give a brief overview of your job search is a resume objective. If you are currently unemployed due to the coronavirus, you can illustrate that in your objective. Or, if you are looking for a new opportunity to grow your career, you can express that in this section as well. The resume objective should go at the top, underneath your contact details, and only be a sentence or two. Adding an objective can easily bring your resume over one page long.
Additionally, we recommend adding a skills section to your resume. The best way to format your skills section is with a bulleted list of all the skills that coincide with the job description. If you have twelve or more skills, you can quickly bump your resume beyond the one-page mark. Therefore, don’t feel obligated to limit your resume to one page while adding these useful sections to your resume.
You have too much work experience to cram on one page
If you are fresh out of school or have only been working for a couple of years, you want to aim for the one-page mark. However, if you are 10 years or more into your career, you have likely held several titles or worked for multiple companies. Thus, it is nearly impossible to cram all of that great working experience onto a single page. Don’t do yourself an injustice by eliminating valuable working experience just to reduce your resume to one page. By trimming significant accomplishments, skills, or other experiences, you can be hurting your chances of landing a job.
Or, if you are applying for a leadership role, there is absolutely no way you should be cutting things out of your resume to make it fit onto one page. If you have 20+ years of experience or the job is for a management position, you won’t make the cut by removing your valuable responsibilities, achievements, and leadership skills.
You should be tailoring your resume
If you tailor your resume for each job application, it is almost impossible to keep your resume under one page. When you tailor your resume, you examine the job description and pick out the essential qualifications they want. Once you know what the hiring manager is looking for, you can tweak how you phrase specific duties, responsibilities, and other information to align with the job description. This makes it easy for hiring managers to see that you are a good fit for the job and improve your odds of receiving a job interview. So, if you are making the most of your resume by tailoring it, don’t be afraid to go beyond a single page.
Need more resume advice?
So, next time you ask yourself whether your resume should be one page, remember these three points. If you are searching for more resume advice to help secure a new job this year, review our candidate resources on our blog!
