How long should a resume be?

One page, for most candidates. Two pages becomes reasonable once you have roughly a decade or more of relevant experience to summarize. Past that, the guideline is less a fixed rule and more a reflection of how reviewers actually read.

Why one page, specifically

A hiring manager or recruiter typically spends under a minute on a first pass through a resume, often well under that. A second page frequently goes unread, not out of unfairness, but because the first page already gave them enough to decide whether to keep reading, move on, or ask follow-up questions in an interview. Content on a page that is rarely reached is not doing much work.

One page also forces a kind of editing discipline that tends to produce a stronger document on its own. Deciding what to cut, rather than what to add, generally leaves you with your strongest material, because the weakest bullets are the ones that get sacrificed first.

When two pages is correct

Once someone has ten-plus years of relevant experience, multiple roles, and a genuinely broader skill set, compressing all of it onto one page usually means either shrinking the font past readability or cutting achievements that a reviewer at that seniority level would actually want to see. At that point, two pages that stay tightly relevant beats one page that is visually cramped or missing real signal.

The test is not years of total career length; it is whether the second page is full of material a reviewer for this specific role would care about, or whether it is there because cutting felt uncomfortable.

What almost never justifies extra length

Early-career candidates padding a page and a half with every internship, class project, and volunteer role, most of which would be stronger compressed into fewer, better-chosen lines. Formatting choices, like large margins or generous line spacing, used to stretch thin content to fill a page, which reviewers notice even if they cannot articulate exactly what feels off.

How to actually cut, when you need to

Cutting length is usually a relevance problem before it is a wording problem. Start by removing entire roles or bullets that are old, unrelated to the job you are applying for, or simply weak, rather than trying to trim every sentence by a few words first. A resume with six strong bullets is more effective than one with twelve mediocre ones, and it is also shorter.

Letting the content set its own length

For developers, the temptation to over-include is strongest in the Projects and Skills sections, where it is easy to list every repository and every tool ever touched. resumefromgit.com generates a visual CV and a resume PDF from a public GitHub profile using the repositories and languages that actually have real activity behind them, which naturally favors a shorter, more relevant list over an exhaustive one.