Career experts report that the average length of resumes has almost doubled over the past few years. They advise job seekers to review their CVs and remove unnecessary details so that it is easier for recruiters to find the main points.
Career experts report that the average length of resumes has almost doubled over the past few years. They advise job seekers to review their CVs and remove unnecessary details so that it is easier for recruiters to find the main points.
In recent years, in a competitive job market, the temptation to overdo your resume with extra details about your skills and professional accomplishments has grown, several career experts told Business Insider. However, a large document can also be more difficult to navigate.
«You want your resume to be a sales page, not a Wikipedia page,» said Madeleine Mann, career coach and CEO of Self Made Millennial.
Many jobseekers find that including additional details will help demonstrate their qualifications to employers. But, Mann said, employers have certain resume requirements — often what’s listed in the job description.
LiveCareer’s study of the 50,000 or so resumes in its database found that, on average, they nearly doubled between 2018 and 2023 as more candidates added a section highlighting their skills. LiveCareer also found that the number of people giving significant résumé space to certifications, languages and other accomplishments roughly doubled.
James Neave, head of data science at job site Adzuna, said he’s also seen resumes get inflated. According to him, the average word count of American resumes in his database has increased by about 40% since August 2021.
According to Niv, one of the reasons for the «bloat» of resumes may be the tendency to fill them with all the keywords from the job description.
So-called «keyword stuffing,» where a jobseeker adds keywords or phrases that appear in a job ad to their resume, is nothing new. However, more and more jobseekers can focus on it, trying to bypass the applicant tracking systems that most major employers use to sort resumes.
Jasmine Escalera, a career expert at LiveCareer, said that many candidates feel the need to include more keywords, skills, and components such as achievements in their CV just to stay afloat in a competitive job market. . But, according to her, it is easy to overdo it. By adding too much, there is a risk that the recruiter will miss what is most important.
Escalera recommends that jobseekers use separate sections to make their resume easy to read. She suggests working from the top down, starting with a professional resume. Unlike the «goal» that once came first, a professional resume should focus on how the candidate can contribute to what the employer is looking for.
But unlike an «objective,» which once could consist of a sentence or two, professional resumes are often overloaded with information about how long a candidate has worked in previous positions, various skills, and the value they could bring to the job.
Next comes the skills section. For people applying for positions with quantifiable results, such as sales or marketing, it may be wise to include a career achievements section. After that, experience and, finally, education.
While using artificial intelligence to write or update resumes is nothing new, Mann believes the technology may explain why at least some resumes have gotten bigger. While technology can help with resume writing and screening, AI can also carry some risks, she said.
«It’s an average of all the resources out there, so it creates incredibly general resumes,» says Mann.
According to her, this is due to the fact that many people have long been writing resumes in fairly formulaic ways, and this is the main part of what artificial intelligence was trained on.
For years, beginners were advised to write a resume of about one page. More experienced workers generally feel that they should limit their resume to two pages and no more than three.
This advice is still relevant, Niv noted. «If I get a resume that’s four or five pages long, I’m already internally groaning,» he says.
He recommends that people with five years of work experience or less limit their resumes to one page. In most cases, two pages are enough for employees with longer experience.
Earlier, the American IT worker Andrew Yong told how thanks to his resume he managed to get a position with a six-figure salary at Google and Meta. He also made it to the final rounds at tech companies like Amazon, Uber, and Spotify by honing his resume, he said.
