Dear Rose:
I read your story about the member who found success with a one- page resume. I was so inspired that I reduced my own resume from four pages to one.
Instead of bullets under each of the four jobs that I have held over the past 10 years, I listed all of the positions and then had one section called "Results." But I often found that this resulted in my repeating the same information throughout the resume.
I am hopeful that it is more important to list the results that I have achieved rather than specifying these results under each position that I have held. At the end of the day, it seems to make a lot of sense - who has time to read a three- or four-page resume anyway?
Sincerely,
Betty Brief
The Long and Short of the Resume
Ah, the resume. The question of how to encapsulate a career's worth of achievement into a single document has bedeviled job seekers for decades. The debate over how long a resumé should be is as old as the resume itself. One school of thought is to lay it all out and not worry about how long the final product runs. But recent thinking has stressed the effectiveness of brevity. Get it all on one page and your resume will work better.
As Betty Brief (obviously not her real name) mentions, sevice recently published an article about a member who used the one-page formula with great success. Many others have had similar success with the same strategy. So there is something to the one-pager. But you don't want to take things too literally.
A Two-Tiered Resume Strategy
Let me put this discussion of one-page resumes into the larger context. To maximize the effectiveness of a resume, you must do two things:
Understand what makes you unique as a manager and distinguishes you from your peers; and
Craft a document that conveys these qualities to recruiters and prospective employers.
There's nothing magical about a single page. It's a nice benchmark but it doesn't guarantee success. Cramming a life's work into one page simply for the sake of achieving the one-page resume is elevating form over substance. By the same token, brevity is important and a one-page resume can be a powerful weapon in your career arsenal.
So my advice to Betty and the members of cv editing services is to create two versions of your resume: A one-pager and a full blown version.
Some situations call for a one-page overview or quick snapshot. Consider this your executive summary/micro resume. But a one-pager won't serve you well in all situations. Decision-makers, board members and others may want to know much more about you - like who you are as a decision-maker, troubleshooter, influencer, etc. So I would urge you to describe these nuances within an extended portion of the resume. Be prepared to extend the resume to two or three pages or create attachments to flesh out the core qualities set out in the one-page version of your resume.
I have learned from recruiters and career consultants that resumes of executives and upper managers typically run up to three pages. The experts recommend that you treat the first page as your "snap-off"synopsis and include all the essential information including a dynamic executive profile, a chart or graph to illustrate easily grabbed information and the most phenomenal accomplishments (as related to the target goal).
Conclusion
In summary, I would encourage cv editing services members to include the one-page "micro" resume in your toolkit, but don't rely on it exclusively. It's also important to create either a longer, meatier resume or to attach addenda to the one-pager. The essential point is ensuring that the resume - however long it runs - captures and conveys the qualities and intangibles that make you unique.
Wishing you career success!
