How long should a resume be

The convention: how many pages where

• United States — one page. With a shorter career this is a hard convention, not a suggestion.
• United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, France, Spain — up to two.
• Italy and Portugal — three surprises nobody.

These numbers are a ceiling, not a target. Nobody ever got an interview for filling up the second page.

Why we count words, not pages

A page says nothing about content. At one-inch margins and 11-point type it holds roughly 500 words; set tightly, the same text takes half a page, set loosely it takes two. „One page” can therefore mean a thorough resume or a nearly empty sheet.

So the length check looks at the word count of the whole document:

• under 180 words — fail: there is nothing in the document to extract skills from,
• 180–260 words — warning: readable, but a recruiter has nothing to justify an interview with,
• 260–900 words — fine; most good resumes live here,
• over 900 words — warning: this is no longer a document anyone scans in thirty seconds.

Too short is the more common problem

Contrary to most advice online. A 150-word document gives nothing to compare — not for a recruiter, and not for a filter searching the database for skills. The candidate loses not because they wrote too much, but because they wrote nothing specific.

The symptom is usually an experience section made of job titles and dates only, without a single bullet saying what actually happened in that job.

What to cut when it runs long

1. Duties copied from a job posting years ago. „Responsible for delivery of assigned tasks” carries no information and occupies a line.
2. Jobs from more than fifteen years back, unless they bear directly on what you are applying for. The company name and dates are enough.
3. Skills with no backing. A list of twenty tools when five appear in your experience weakens those five instead of strengthening the rest.
4. Interests, decade-old courses, a driving licence where the role does not call for one.
5. Walls of text. A paragraph longer than roughly 340 characters will not get read anyway; breaking it into bullets shortens the document and raises the odds someone sees it.

What never to cut

• Numbers. A bullet with a measured outcome is the most valuable line in the document and the first thing a recruiter reaches for.
• Full dates with months. A bare year looks like rounding up, and gets read that way. The date check flags it separately.
• Contact details. That is the second heaviest format check — a missing phone number can weigh more than a page of content.

Shortening that is not shortening

Three tricks that reduce the page count without reducing anything else — and each costs more than it gives:

• Two columns. They fit more on a page and are the third heaviest penalty in the format check.
• Type below 10 point and margins under half an inch. The document becomes unreadable to a human and changes nothing for a parser.
• Dropping section headings to save lines. Missing „Experience” or „Skills” is the single heaviest penalty in the whole format check — parsers match headings against a known list, and without them they do not know what they are reading.

If the document still does not fit the market convention after cutting everything that adds nothing, then you simply have a long career. A second page is fine everywhere except the United States.