The one-page rule and why almost nobody has a real reason to break it
Okay you guys, we already read your résumé out loud last time and marked up the vague lines. Now we're going to make it shorter. I know. You just spent twenty minutes adding words back in and now I'm telling you to cut.
Here's the rule: one page. If you've got more than fifteen years of relevant experience in a field where that history actually matters, maybe two. That's it. That's the whole exception list.
Almost nobody has a real reason to go longer than that. I've heard the arguments. "I've had a lot of jobs." "I want them to see everything I've done." "I don't want to leave anything out." None of that is a reason. That's just not wanting to make a decision.
Why one page
A hiring manager is not going to read four pages. She's got a stack of résumés and about thirty seconds for the first pass. If your important stuff is on page three, it doesn't exist. It never gets read.
One page forces you to decide what actually matters. That's uncomfortable, and that's the point.
How to actually do this at home
Print your résumé. Actual paper. Looking at it on a screen lets you pretend it's shorter than it is.
Go line by line and ask yourself: does this line help me get this job, the one I'm applying for right now? Not "is this true," not "am I proud of this." Does it help. If the answer's no, or you have to think about it too long, it's a cut candidate.
Start with the easy stuff:
- Jobs from more than ten years ago that have nothing to do with what you're applying for now. Gone, usually.
- Objective statements. Nobody reads them. We covered that.
- Anything that's a duty instead of an accomplishment. "Responsible for scheduling" — cut it or rewrite it as what actually happened because of the scheduling.
- Full sentences where a short phrase does the job. You don't need "Successfully managed a team of five employees on a daily basis." You need "Managed a team of five."
Then do the harder cut. Pick your two or three strongest jobs and let them take up the space. Everything else gets a line or gets dropped.
The "hard worker" problem
I want to tell you about my daughter Sadie's first résumé, because this is where most of you are right now and I want you to see how fast it fixes.
She was twenty, applying for her first real job outside of babysitting, and her résumé said things like "hard worker" and "team player" and "great communication skills." Every line was something anybody could claim about themselves and nobody could check. A stranger reading it learns nothing about Sadie specifically. It could've been written by any twenty-year-old on earth.
I made her go through it and rewrite every single line as something she'd actually, measurably done. Not "responsible for customer service" — how many customers, doing what, with what result. She hated this for about a day. Genuinely annoyed with me. But by the end she had lines like "handled register and closing procedures for a store averaging $2,000 in daily sales" instead of "responsible for cash handling." That's a sentence a stranger can picture. That's a sentence that tells a hiring manager something.
She got the job. I'm not saying it was only the résumé, but I'll tell you the version with "hard worker" on it wasn't getting a callback.
This is the opinion I'll say straight out: every line on your résumé should be something a stranger could verify. If you can't attach a number or a specific detail to it, either dig for the detail or cut the line. "Hard worker" is worthless. "Cut inventory costs 12%" is worth reading. That's not a small distinction, that's the whole game.
And here's the thing — cutting the fluff lines is usually where you find your extra page. You don't need to shrink the font to 9-point and mash the margins down to a quarter inch to hit one page (please don't do this, it looks awful and it's obviously a stall tactic). You need fewer, better lines. Cut the vague stuff and the length problem mostly solves itself.
What to do with what's left over
Don't throw away the cut material. Keep a second document — I call mine my "everything" file — with every job, every duty, every possible line you've ever written about yourself. When you're tailoring a résumé for a specific job later, you go back to that file and pull out whatever's relevant to that posting. Nothing gets permanently lost, it just doesn't all live on the one page you're sending out today.
Before next time
Get your résumé down to one page before you come back, even if it feels brutal. Bring both versions, the long one and the cut one, so we can look at what you kept.