It might be time to put your résumé on a diet.
In recent years, a competitive job market has ramped up the temptation to trick out résumés with added details about our skills and professional accomplishments, several career experts told Business Insider. Yet a swole document can also be harder to navigate.
"You want to make your résumé a sales page, not a Wikipedia page," Madeline Mann, a career coach and CEO of Self Made Millennial, told BI.
Many job seekers believe that including extra detail will help show off their qualifications to employers. But, Mann said, employers have specifics they're seeking on a résumé — often what's outlined in the job description.
"You do not want it to be a treasure hunt for them to find those things," she said. As word counts on our CVs creep higher, more employers might have to search for what they need.
A review by LiveCareer of some 50,000 résumés in its database found that, on average, they had nearly doubled in length from 2018 to 2023 as more job seekers did things like adding a section highlighting their skills.
LiveCareer also found that the number of people devoting résumé real estate to certificates, languages, and other accomplishments had about doubled.
James Neave, the head of data science at the job site Adzuna, told BI that he'd also seen CVs balloon. On average, the word count of the US résumés in its database has increased by about 40% since August 2021, he said.
Stay relevant
Neave said one culprit behind résumé creep could be the inclination to inject our professional calling cards with all of the keywords from a job description.
So-called keyword stuffing, where you add the operative words or phrases that appear in a job posting to your résumé, is nothing new. Yet more people hunting down jobs might be focusing on that in an attempt to shoulder their way past the applicant-tracking systems that most large employers use to sort résumés.
Jasmine Escalera, a career expert with LiveCareer, told BI that many job seekers feel the need to include more keywords, skills, and components like accomplishments in their résumés simply to stay afloat in a competitive job market.
That landscape appears to be growing a wee bit less forgiving. The US government's August jobs figures, released Friday, showed hiring came in below analysts' expectations. Downward revisions to June and July's payroll numbers also signaled that summertime job growth was weaker than previously reported.
Escalera said many job seekers want to add to their résumé to ensure someone reading it can understand the value, contributions, and accomplishments that would make them a good fit for a role.
But it's easy to overdo it, Escalera said. Adding too much risks having a recruiter overlook what's most important.
She recommends job seekers use distinct sections to help make their résumé easy to read. Escalera suggests working from the top down by starting with a professional summary. Unlike the "objective" that once took the top spot, the professional summary should focus on how the candidate can contribute to what the employer is seeking, she said.
But, unlike an objective that once might have been a sentence or two, professional summaries often get loaded up with how long we've worked, various skills, and the value we'd bring to a job, Escalera said.
"There's much more going into this thing to be able to stand out," she said.
Next up is a skills section. For people applying for roles with quantifiable results — like sales or marketing — it can be wise to then include a section on career accomplishments. Following that would be experience and, last, education.
AI doesn't always help
While using AI to write or revamp résumés hasn't been a thing for very long, Mann said that the technology could explain at least some CVs' newfound heft. That's because while the tech can help draft and proof résumés, AI can also bring its own risks, she said.
"It's the average of all the resources that are out there, so it creates these incredibly generic résumés," Mann said.
The reason, she said, is because many people have been writing résumés in rather generic ways for a long time so that's the bulk of what AI has been trained on.
Stick to two pages — maximum
For years, the advice has broadly been that newbie workers should keep their résumé to about a page. More seasoned workers, the thinking often goes, should cap their CVs around two pages and not go beyond three.
That advice still holds, Adzuna's Neave said.
"If I get a CV and it's like four or five pages, I'm inwardly groaning already," he said. That's because it's just harder to work with, Neave said.
He recommends people with five years or less of work experience cap a résumé at a page. For longer-tenure workers, two pages should suffice in most cases.
Focus on your most recent experience
Mann, from Self Made Millennial, said that because employers tend to care about your most recent work, it's best to focus the experience section on the past decade or about the last four roles.
For most experience beyond that, she said, it's often sufficient to drop in a bullet for that role or just name the jobs. It's still important that the résumé be an accurate portrayal of your career path, Mann said, but going into detail on the old stuff often isn't useful for employers.
"If a company is interviewing you and you're constantly going back 10-plus years to answer their questions, that is going to probably hurt you," she said. "They are more interested in what have you been up to lately."