When 1 Page Resume Doesn’t Work

We all heard the advice.

“Stick your resume to just one page. Not any longer.”

The statement holds true in most of cases, and this became a golden rule of writing resumes. But does this golden rule has any exception? Would there be a case when resume of more than one page is better than keeping everything in one page?

To answer this question, we need to understand what is the origin behind this “one page resume” rule. Back in a day when printing in papers was the only option, a potential job seeker has printed out a bunch of 10–100 resumes and handed these to the employers from different companies. And this process is still dominant till today, particularly noticeable from on-campus career fairs around the universities. When a recruiter takes a hard copied resume from a potential candidate, the recruiter uses a pair of hands to hold the resume, to scan it quickly, and to put the resume on top of stacks of other candidates’ resumes. First time impression matters and, thus, a job candidate handing out multiple pages of paper resumes can appear unprofessional. A recruiter might judge “this person does not know how to organize and to edit writings properly” or “did he or she learned what is the some no-no’s for resume writing?” Furthermore, reading through resumes is likely a mundane task for the recruiters and then he or she perhaps forms a negative perception about the candidate because of this.

But a number of things have changed since the technology rapidly has advanced. Many job…