Twenty Years Doesn't Fit on One Page

The one-page rule

The first thing everyone tells you is to cut it to one page. Recruiters are busy, hiring managers skim, nobody reads past the fold.

I'll be a little cynical here. I understand recruiters have a lot to get through. But everything is electronic now. If they only want to look at the first page, that's what they look at. If they want to print it, they can print page one. Nobody is forced to read page three.

And if they don't scroll down, they've already decided about you. The page count didn't change that.

The way I see it, the one-page rule is a way for someone with a five-year career to compete with someone who has twenty-five. You have the twenty-five. You earned it. Don't hide it because someone might not feel like reading it.

Own the history

Mine goes all the way back to the Navy. Every job, every title. What I do instead of cutting is collapse: the older positions shrink down to company and title, so the recent, relevant work gets the space and the rest is still there for anyone who wants it. That's how the résumé builder in Bridani handles it automatically, you can't do the same thing in a Word document.

Here's the thing about the person who's actually interested in you. They're about to pay you for years of full days. They can spend ten minutes reading. And every minute they spend reading your five pages is a minute they're not reading someone else's.

The hiring manager who took me on after my two-year search told me later that he'd read every word of my résumé and my website before we ever spoke. Not the five or six skills a one-page résumé has room for. The full list. Every course I'd taken. It felt like I had the job before interviewed.

What a normal résumé has no room for

This is where twenty years actually costs you, and it's not the page count. It's the sections that don't exist.

Skills. A one-page résumé fits half a dozen. In twenty years you've used fifty. The one that gets you the interview might be number thirty-seven.

Continuing education. I completed more than twenty courses during my search. On a normal résumé that's a single line, if it's there at all. Listed out, it told that hiring manager exactly how I'd spent the two years and that I'd kept moving.

Projects. Every interviewer asked me about cloud experience, and every version of my résumé said nothing, because my jobs had never touched the cloud. What I had done was build my own app, hosted on Azure, deployed in Docker containers with a real pipeline. There's no line on a standard résumé for that. So I made one.

Community. One company asked me what I do for my community. They were the biggest employer in the area and they meant it. I've coached my kids' football, softball, baseball, wrestling, lacrosse and martial arts for years. I was a volunteer firefighter and a volunteer EMT. Where does that go on a résumé? It doesn't. But if someone tells you they ran into burning buildings for free, that tells you something about them.

Awards. I've got medals from the Navy and a Computer Science faculty award from college. Nobody asks about them in an interview, and they don't belong in a bullet under a job. But they still belong somewhere.

Education, properly. A normal résumé gives you the school, the degree and the year. Mine lists the courses and the major GPA, because I took physics, physics II and calculus II in the same semester and I'd like that on the record.

None of that fits on one page. All of it got read.

What I'd actually do

Keep everything. Put the last ten years in full and collapse the rest to titles. Add sections for the things above that a template doesn't give you. Then, before it goes anywhere, get it checked for spelling and tense, because that's the one thing that actually does get you binned on page one.

Next: how I kept sixty interviews straight, and the day I walked into one with notes for the wrong company.