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As someone who reads more resumes than he writes, I support the two page
limit unconditionally. If you can't condense and focus your information down
to two pages, don't bother writing to me. What everyone forgets is that a
resume is not meant to give a full history of your educational and working
life, it's an ad to get an interview. A CV as I understand it is more
something to impress people at a talk you're giving or an article you've
written. Usually when it's meant to be a resume, calling it a CV is high
falutin' purple prose.
Bruce
==============================================
Bruce Evans M.D.
Family Physician and Technical Writer
"Never Underestimate the power of very stupid people in large numbers."
Hmmm...I half-agree with this:^)
As of a few years ago, my resume was five pages long, and spanned 11
years. As you mention, my opening page received the most refining as I
wrote an eye-catching objective, and a summary of skills that would
have made an ad-man proud. The first two jobs under Experience were
also polished. But recruiters and employers seemed to be a bit put off
by the overall length of the resume - like simply seeing "Page 1 of 5"
at the bottom of Microsoft Word was too much for them to bear.
I've since reduced my resume to just under two pages. And trust me
when I say 'just under.' One more punctuation mark and I'm at three.
I was able to reduce the length of my resume by bulleting all of the
job duties for all of the positions that I've held. Although this
tactic still produced a four page resume, I was now able to use that to
generate job-specific resumes. For example, if I was responding to a
job position that required documentation for SAP or PeopleSoft, I
simply highlighted those tasks and deleted other non-specific tasks.
This was easier for me than maintaining several versions of my resume.
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