How Long Should a Resume Be

These are meant to be guidelines, and not strict page limits. If everything that matters fits comfortably on one page, there’s no reason to add another. If you’ve cut irrelevant experience and your resume still needs two pages to show the qualifications that matter for the job, use two pages.

Cornell College’s Berry Career Institute mentions a similar approach for students, recommending that most college students keep their resume to one page while also suggesting that they maintain a longer master resume containing all of their experience. The point is to edit that larger record down for each application rather than trying to fit everything into the version you send.

That same idea works for other career stages as well. Your resume should be long enough to make your case, but short enough that the relevant information doesn’t get buried.

Can a Resume Be 2 Pages?

Yes, a two-page resume can be a good choice when you have enough relevant experience to justify it. This is more common as your career progresses, but seniority isn’t the only reason to use two pages.

You might need two pages if you have:

• Several recent roles that are relevant to the position.
• Leadership experience that shows increasing scope.
• Major projects or achievements worth explaining.
• Technical experience that’s important to the job.
• Certifications or specialized training that the employer is likely to care about.
• A combination of relevant experiences that would feel cramped on one page.

What you don’t need is a second page just to be able to include every job you’ve ever held. Older positions can usually be shortened, and unrelated experience can often be removed. Long lists of responsibilities are not as useful as a few strong, highly relevant achievements. Youth Central, a Victorian Government career service, similarly advises against padding a resume and notes that a well-presented one-page resume can be more effective than a longer resume filled with unnecessary information.

Page two should give the reader something useful. If your second page includes mostly older roles, repeated skills, or responsibilities that don’t add much to your application, that’s a sign to cut more content.

There’s also no need to make the first page so crowded that it becomes hard to read. If reducing your resume to one page means tiny text, narrow margins, or seven lines of information without necessary white spaces, you’ve taken the rule too far just to avoid adding a second page.

Making a One-page Resume Work

If your resume is two pages and you’d prefer to get it down to one, start with the content. Don’t start by changing the font size to 9 points to fit everything. Formatting can be adjusted for fine-tuning after the content has been reviewed.

1. Cut Information That Doesn’t Help Your Case

Look at every section and ask whether it helps explain why you’re qualified for this particular job. You probably don’t need:

• An objective statement that says you want to grow professionally
• A long list of basic or outdated skills
• Detailed descriptions of unrelated jobs from early in your career
• Every certification you’ve ever earned
• Five bullets explaining the same responsibility

This can be uncomfortable when you’ve spent years building your career, but a resume shouldn’t be a record of everything you’ve done. Think of it as a selection of the experience that’s useful for the job you’re applying for.

2. Give More Space to Recent, Relevant Work

Your most recent roles usually deserve the most attention. If you’re applying for a senior marketing position, for example, your recent marketing leadership experience matters more than a job you held 7 years ago that has no connection to what you do now.

That doesn’t mean older experience has to disappear completely. It just doesn’t need the same amount of detail. You might use five bullets for your current position, three for the role before that, and one or two lines for an older position.

3. Replace Duties With Achievements

A resume can get long very quickly if you turn every job into a list of responsibilities. Instead of: “Managed a team of 15 sales representatives and oversaw regional sales operations.” you might write: “Led a 15-person sales team across three regions, increasing annual revenue from $8.2M to $11.6M.” The second bullet gives the reader more to work with, and it doesn’t take much more space.

4. Look for Repetition

This is one of the easiest ways to shorten a resume. If your summary says you’re skilled in process improvement, your skills section lists process improvement, and four job descriptions mention it again, you probably don’t need all of those references. Keep the strongest evidence and remove the rest.

The same applies to phrases like “responsible for,” “worked with,” and “helped with.” They often take up space without adding much information.

5. Use Formatting to Help

Once the content is under control, look at the layout. You can usually make small adjustments to margins, spacing, headings, and font size without making the resume difficult to read. Just don’t use formatting tricks to squeeze a two-page resume into one page when the content clearly needs more room.

A good one-page resume should still have some breathing room. If you want a starting point built for this resume length, Toptal's one-page resume template can save you some of that editing work.

When a Longer Resume Makes Sense

Two pages can make sense when you’ve built up enough relevant experience that cutting the resume further would leave out information a recruiter actually needs.

This often happens with senior and executive candidates. You may have multiple leadership roles, large teams, major initiatives, or results that need a little more explanation, but don’t assume that 10+ years of experience automatically means you need two pages.

A senior candidate with 12+ years of experience and a focused career history might have an excellent one-page resume. Another candidate with 5+ years of experience might have enough directly relevant projects and accomplishments to need two pages. The number of years is a useful guideline, but it shouldn’t be used as a formula for every resume.

What About an Academic CV?

Academic applications are a different situation. If you’re applying for an academic or research position, you might need a CV rather than a standard resume. A CV can be several pages long because it usually includes publications, research, grants, teaching experience, conference presentations, awards, and other work that’s relevant in an academic setting.

Trying to squeeze all of that into one or two pages usually isn’t the point. If you’re unsure which document you need, see the Recruitment.com’s CV vs. resume guide for a closer look at how the two differ.

Give Your Resume a Final Check

Once you’ve settled on the resume length and content, take a step back and read it through as if you were the person hiring for the role. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you tell what the candidate does?
• Can you find the most relevant experience quickly?
• Are the strongest achievements easy to spot?
• Does anything feel like it’s there simply because the candidate didn’t know what else to cut?

If the resume is clear, relevant, and easy to read, you’re probably close. Once you’ve got the content where you want it, you can use the ⁠Toptal Resume Builder to build and format your resume. Then run it through the ⁠Toptal ATS Resume Checker as a final check.