There is no set standard length for a resume. However, eye scans and recruiter surveys show that reader interest drops off dramatically after the second page. So you are good up to two pages. If your resume template is set up properly, and your title, summary, skills sections, and all your experience is focused to your field, then you shouldn’t need more than two pages to prove why you are the best candidate.

A one page resume might indicate that you are comfortable with a more junior level, because college graduates are really the only candidates who limit to one page due to their lack of experience.

For anyone who has been in the workforce for a few years, if you’re trying to fit all of your experience on one page, ask yourself if you are omitting important proof of why you deserve the job so you can limit the resume to one page. Plus, if you limit your resume to one page then you won’t have a title, summary, and skills section at the top. These top sections are crucial if you want the hiring team to notice you. This is not my opinion, this has been proven with eye scans.

Conversely, if you go the smart route and decide to add a title, summary, and skills section at the top of your resume, then you will barely have room for two jobs on that one page.

If you want to fit the title, summary, and skills and your most recent jobs, you might try to reduce the type size to accommodate everything. But you don’t want to go smaller than 10pt type. Actually, you really don’t want to go smaller than 10.5pt for readability. I’ve seen 9-point type resumes and they are not fun on the eyes.

Many people claim one page because their cousin’s best friend’s uncle used to hire people at his small company ten years ago. Or worse, because a peer suggested it. Save yourself wasted time and effort and get some professional help instead.

There is no preferred job board. In fact, you’ll probably see the same jobs listed in multiple places.

LinkedIn is one source for jobs. Some might say that it is the source for jobs these days, more so than even Google. However, the key to a successful job search anywhere is how you search.

You’ll get better results on any job board when you search for skills and not job titles. Job titles vary wildly company to company, division to division, and even team to team within the same division. Therefore, chances are very slim that you will enter the title exactly as any company has it. Instead, a search for a specific skill like “Advanced Excel” or SaaS will give you more helpful results.

To use any job board effectively, if your skill is a phrase, like “Relationship Management” make sure to put the phrase in the quotation marks, like I did here, which makes it a boolean search. What does that mean? With boolean searches you use punctuation with the words to direct a search engine in how it sees the words. By putting both words in quotes the search engines will look for all jobs that include the full phrase relationship management. If you put in relationship management without the quotes, the system looks for the word relationship or the word management, but not necessarily the two together. By putting the entire phrase in quotation marks and entering it as a skill, you’ll get better results.

Here are words that will not help you in your job search on any job board:

• Management

• Communication

• Leadership

These words are way too general, just like they are way too general on your resume (and LinkedIn). Using these words as skills in keyword searches will bring up millions of results, and that is not helpful.

You also want to add information like a specific state and company size to narrow down the search further.

But these job boards aren’t your only options. If you want to be more proactive, find out about specialty associations for your field. Pretty much every field has some kind of association where people from the field can connect, and they usually have some form of a job board. Even career coaches have about 5-6 online groups that we can connect with to find jobs. Do some research.

Do not pay for job board membership unless it is a benefit of an association membership. There are fake job boards that require paid memberships, and then it turns out all the jobs don’t exist.

There is no preferred job board. In fact, you’ll probably see the same jobs listed in multiple places.

Many people think a job search starts with a resume, but you might want to start with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has about 1 billion users in 250 countries. Not everyone is active all the time, but recruiters, headhunters, and hiring teams are on LinkedIn all the time looking for people to fill positions.

When you make sure that your LinkedIn profile is optimized with a strong headline, About section, and Experience section that demonstrate your impact, then you can start to reach out to recruiters, friends, and colleagues.
Please contact us about this.

When you connect with people they will look at your profile. Or when hiring teams do their search, your profile will show up in their search results. And then job opportunities come up.

Then you can update your resume to apply to the job.

That is an excellent way to start the job search.

A few possible reasons:

1. Your resume doesn’t contain skills and tools that match open jobs right now.

2. Recruiters are very busy with multiple clients.

3. The job description changed and they’re figuring out if they should still speak with you.

4. The salary of the job changed and they’re wondering if they should still speak with you.

5. They have questions (or more questions) about your experience, your LinkedIn profile is unhelpful, and they’re figuring out if they should take the time to reach out to you.

6. Your resume looks like every other resume out there and they’re trying to figure out if they should talk to you.

Your experience may be appropriate, but you probably did not match the resume title, summary, and skills section to the job on the resume. Maybe your experience didn’t meet their needs. Maybe you didn’t demonstrate through impact and results why they should talk to you instead of someone else.

Ask for what you think you deserve. Be prepared to prove this number with your impact. You cannot use skills, experience, education, or passion to prove your point, because the hiring team will not listen to this. But they will listen to you when you prove how you plan to address the company’s needs and make the company better. Be aware that your ask may or may not be within the amount budgeted for the position.

At the various companies, the hiring team has probably determined that your resume does not match the job that you’re applying to. If you are using one resume to apply to all positions, you reduce your chances of an interview.

Control Your Career’s methods will help reduce ageism. All the impact that you show in your materials should outweigh any other issues, including age bias. However, if you are still having issues, email us!

Your resume probably has to get through the company’s first line of defense, which is their applicant tracking system (ATS) or filtering software. This software comes in many shapes and sizes and there are many companies that make them.

The basic idea of the ATS software is to help the recruiters and hiring teams filter out inappropriate and unqualified candidates. As annoying as this part is to job seekers, trust me when I tell you that the company needs this software. The hiring team is receiving anywhere from five to thousands of resumes every day, and most of those resumes are totally wrong for the job.

In fact, I would venture that up to 98% of resumes are wrong for any job opening.

So instead of the hiring manager making the hiring team look at Every. Single. Resume. they use this software to search for the resumes that contain the skills and experience that they’re requiring for the job.

Are these systems helpful? Absolutely.

Are they flawed? Absolutely.

But the alternative, looking at every single resume, is sometimes just not doable.

So count on your resume having to get past the awkward ATS software before it can be seen by a person. That’s just the way the world works now.

Unless you plan on paying a recruiter to reach out directly to hiring managers as companies, probably not. Most companies have protocols in place. Even if you try to circumvent the process by going to the company’s website and reaching out to another contact, chances are that contact will simply send your resume to the person in charge of hiring. Therefore your resume will still go through the software anyway.

Either format works, but some companies use legacy or cheaper ATS systems, and those systems have a harder time parsing (breaking up and identifying parts of) your resume in PDF format. If you have ever uploaded your resume, and then you see the information in the resume rearranged and wrong in a template, that means the company’s system couldn’t parse your resume information from the PDF. But you had no way of knowing that until after you uploaded the resume.

The benefit of using the PDF format for emails to specific contacts at a company is that you can be sure the reader is seeing your resume exactly as you intend. A PDF is like a photograph of your resume, so it will maintain formatting regardless of any computer system.

When you hear people refer to a hidden job market they are not referring to something secret and elite. They are referring to the fact that most jobs are not posted publicly, that companies often hire internally without ever announcing the open position. Or if the right person is put in front of the hiring team, the hiring team will go out of their way to place that person.

Depending on who you speak to, there are anywhere from 20% to 80% of jobs that are not advertised. Control Your Career provides access to those jobs.

Yes, it definitely helps to know someone at a company to get hired there. Personal recommendations and referrals are always good. However, you can also get a job applying online. Many people land jobs via job boards.

The key to making your job search shorter and more successful is to consider as many paths as possible for the job search.

1. Network

2. Apply to online jobs

3. Talk to friends and family

4. Join associations

5. Hire Control Your Career

The more paths you take, the more chances that you will be presented with opportunities.