Importance of keeping resume to 1 page...your thoughts? - Page 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by imschatz 


Most hiring managers (not HR, but the person you will actually work for) want to know you are an interesting person, and a good person to work with. Most of my interviews have spent as much time talking about my interests as my qualifications.

Volunteer work, sports, activities, etc. A few lines, nothing more .. just enough to spark some conversation during an interview.

Definitely good to have an interests and activities section on your resume, especially if you're just starting out and the company places an emphasis on fit. I actually just got an interview because the recruiter thinks my profile is interesting. You still have to be qualified, but it'll make you look more appealing than the guy who spent all of college in the library.

Quote:

Originally Posted by suited 


Aside from the fact that your post is spam, it's terrible advice. Reaching out to companies and directly sending them your resume has landed plenty of people jobs.

When you say "has landed plenty of people jobs," is that data? Could you name these people if you wanted to? If yes, awesome, you've got a point. If not, your opinion may be out of date. I volunteer at a job transition center, and we tell people not to bother "applying" for jobs or (e-)mailing resumes to HR, it's a waste of time. I have worked with dozens of job-seekers (whose names I can produce), and most got their jobs from networking, a few from headhunters, and no one from sending a resume cold or applying to something online. Now, reaching out to specific people is very helpful, in particular if you have some sort of a connection, and the resume can help, but leading with the resume rarely pays off. 

Resumes need to be one full page, well organized, and well edited. You should never use a generic resume. Always mold your resume to the job you are applying for, steal keywords from the job posting, and make it look very professional. It will pay to invest some time and even money into making your resume. You are trying to sell yourself, you need your resume to make the person reading it say, "I want to talk to this person."

I keep my resume to 2 pages but i make sure that the second page only needs to be read if the first page has sufficiently interested the reader.

If I'm e-mailing a resume, I always send it as a PDF as opposed to a Word Document.

1pg is the general expectation, and people are lazy, so they don't want to do more work than what's expected. A lot of recruiters and managers don't even like to fully read 1 page resumes. They look for certain things, and they move on, so if you've got two (or more) pages, then you've just written more words that no one will read. Most people don't have NEARLY enough relevant information to justify more than one page. Just keep it to one.