I am an engineer who had to do many interviews and before conducting interviews I always look at the resume. In my opinion, I rather have 6 pages resume than 1-2 page with so low information that I have no idea what really was done in the last 10 years of this person. That being said, the first page should give the core idea to pursue the reading, but once you have reached the first scan I am in favor bigger resume than a thin one.
I'm also an engineer who has had to interview. My question to you is: how do you filter through 100 people each with 6 pages resumes? I'd rather have 1 page, 2 max, because I have to filter through a bunch of people in a short amount of time.
I did the math once and for the initial filter which was the resume scan, I and another person gave about 1 1/2 minutes per applicant and it still took an hour! I doubt in the future I'll get any more time so please make it scannable in ~1 1/2 minutes.
Would you rather spend an extra minute or two on the resume scan or an extra half an hour in the interview only to find that a month after you hired them, they're incapable of doing the job?
Careful where you think you're wasting time and effort.
Here's the problem with long resumes. Most people don't have anything useful to say. Most of the time when I see a resume of any length, they contain very little useful information. Longer resumes just make it worse. Now, there are ones that describe a project in detail, and you're like "Wow, that's really amazing." Most of the ones I've seen in the programming space are more akin to the 3 paragraph long description of writing stored procedures for a database. I include myself in this group, and that's why I keep it short.
Having a short resume is also a test I use. The hardest paper I ever wrote was in an advanced Psychology class where we had to perform some sort of analysis on a character in a book. The paper had to be at most 4 pages, for something that could have easily taken 10 or more. Understanding how to communicate effectively is one of the best skills that people can have. Do I discount people immediately for not being able to do this? No, but it is something I take note of when I see it.
The first litmus test in this situation is "Is this 6 page resume an engaging read that delivers everything useful effectively?"
If it doesn't and that is important to you, this isn't your person.
Equally, are you discounting this person just because you can't be bothered to spend an extra couple of minutes parsing their resume which upon closer inspection is solid gold?
Being concise and communicating effectively doesn't necessarily mean the same thing.
You would not believe how many resumes I've seen with things like formatting issues and misspellings. I'm picky about getting technical terms correctly, but I understand that everyone might not know there are capital letters in random places in words. If you're going to misspell something, at least be consistent (no joke, I've seen resumes with JavaScript, Javascript and Java Script, and like three sentences apart from each other). Going through 6 pages of that along with phrasing issues is brutally draining. If you have a long resume, give a summary or something of each entry, so I can choose to see if what you are describing is what I'm looking for. With all that being said, I'm pretty forgiving. I understand that if you have English as a second language, you might not know all the nuances to grammar. I get it. I try and give some flexibility.
So here's the thing, with all that in mind, you ask if I can't be bothered, no I can't. Just because someone spews something on a page and calls it a resume does not mean that I should take a look at it. Have some pride in what you send to people. Yes writing resumes suck, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't work at creating it. People say, "I don't know about design", or "I'm not a writer."
1. It's not that hard to understand the basics of design and layout. Buy a book. Read a website. Download a template off the internet.
2. Ask someone to look at it before you send it.
It doesn't have to be great, but it least make it look like you care enough about what you do to make it decent.
1. Decision fatigue
- A longer resume doesn't make the choice easier, it makes it harder because now I have more to compare and contrast more.
2. Half-life of knowledge
- I did computer vision about 5 years ago, but I leave it off my current resume because I know the field has changed so dramatically since I last did it that my knowledge of it is out of date.
I think your comment about computer vision illustrates what's wrong with this industry. If you were able to do computer vision 5 years ago you should be able to get up to speed now. This attitude doesn't allow most of to build a decent resume but instead we have to chase the latest tech all the time and none of our experience counts. For example I would prefer someone who worked on a big complex web site ten years ago with the tools available then over someone who has done a simple web site with the latest React version.
The half-life of knowledge is in the eye of the beholder. The field may have changed dramatically, the technology may have moved on. But much of what we know about how to design computer programs today hasn't changed as much as you think in 50 years. Frameworks have changed, architectures have changed, paradigms have remained very similar. Paradigms are the important part. Be as careful with what you choose to leave out as what you choose to include.
Hello,
I would say that if you need to look at 100 for each position open that the HR people are not doing their job to filter it down enough for you. For each open position, I can understand that engineer that does interview may have a dozen or more but 100 seems to be quite huge. Again, I am targeting an engineer position here, not HR or a manager.
About 1-2 page, nothing forces you to read through all the 6 pages. If the first page is not a fit, then move on. In my experience, a single page often lead to me to have to dig way more on the person to try to find anything related to this one -- not sure that a time saver.
Not disagreeing with what you said, but a lot of multi page resumes I've seen are formatted poorly and have a lot of unhelpful fluff. More pages are fine as long as the info stays relevant.
A skill someone used 10+ years ago but not since probably has little to no relevance in an interview. I was doing Java in 1995, don't ask me about it now tho'...
That is highly dependent on the skill. I haven't troubleshot a circuit board (much) since 2006, but if you put me in front of one with a schematic and some test equipment I sure as hell could do it again right now. I haven't written signal processing code since 2012, but I could jump right back into that as well.
Not all skills and experiences wither at the same rate. This industry has a bad habit of assuming all skills last about as long as your average JavaScript framework. I'm sick of being typecast based on what I have been doing for the past few years.
I tend to like to see more information that is more recent but is also interesting to see the journey of someone. You can get something interesting by knowing that someone is able to switch language without problem or maybe this person is more the type that doesn't change at all. It's also great to see a long track of achievements even if it's been 15 years. Again, information like knowing that someone has been doing technical positions for x amount of year and now is more in a leadership position can give a good idea where the person is moving and what he still could do or understand but has changed in term of priority. Again, every resume should filter the content as its age but someone in the industry for 30 years shouldn't fit everything on 2 pages in my opinion.
As long as it's not the same paragraph repeated 10 times over 6 pages. We see a lot of people, for some reason especially those from big banks, who pretty much write "wrote stored procedures, gathered requirements, wrote unit tests" 10 times.
My favorite resumes are the ones that make me curious about the person and show some enthusiasm but that requires a good writer.
It's really amazing how many resumes I see that have basic spelling and grammar mistakes in them. Like on the order of, damn the squiggle underlines in Word, full steam ahead.
I mostly try to stay away from the more aggravating and useless of grammar pedantry, but it's just not a good signal about diligence and attention to detail.
We did a study on 700 candidates applying for a graduate role, putting CV sift in parallel with work sample and situational judgement testing.
The CV scoring was entirely uncorrelated with who went on to do well (in fact it was slightly negative but not statistically relevant).
That said, graduate level roles suffer from the behavioural/motivational disconnect between education and the workplace. I'd love to do another study with more senior hires.
