Quote:
Originally Posted by ma-skis.com
That's pretty intense, generally 2 full pages for a professinal resume is the standard
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I thought that my entire life, but upon taking professional career counselling a couple of years ago, I learnt it doesn't matter. As a matter of fact, it is more beneficial to have longer resumes when you've been out in the work force for a while and targetting more senior roles.
What I've been told is that when dealing with large companies that have HR departments or dealing with professional job placement agencies, they don't shy away from long resumes. They understand that the more experience you have, the more you have to write. They actually prefer a long coherent resume so they know exactly what you have to deliver and focus more of the interview towards behavioural and situational type questions. Condensed resumes tend to lead to abbreviated sentences and missing content, resulting in more time spent during the interview critiquing your experience, which should have been accomplished by your resume.
What you need to draw them in is a short, effectively written cover letter, that highlights what you can deliver and a well written professional summary in the resume portion. Cover letters with T graphs that outline job requirements and what experience/skillset you have to meet that requirement is a very good tool.
I noticed a remarkably improved response ratio with the non-condensed 5 page resume compared the the 2 pager I used almost all my life. Not to mention, as my skillset and experience grew, it was very difficult fitting in everything I felt was relevant to the posting I was targetting.