Before your resume lands up on hiring manager’s desk, usually it lands up in the hands of a job agent who have only general knowledge of the requirements and hardly have understanding of technicality of requirements. He is probably going to match your resume with line by line requirements and if unfortunately you have phrased the skills differently, you are loosing the change to get into an interview.

On the other hand, the general perception of condensed length of the resume is quite contradictory to real life cases. As the case indicated above you are required to include a better details which should be able to overcome general job agent’s fence. At the same time your resume need to catch attention immediately.

One moment came in my life at a critical juncture of career change where I had to ponder why my resume is not getting the responses from employers or employment agencies. Having gone through so many resumes critique and free sample sites, one major question came in my mind was why so much hype on length of resume? Is it so critical to make or condense the resume to 2-3 pages?

The answer I found is: NO. It is not a rule. However, the most important thing is the marketing right on the page 1 of the resume. If you can catch employer’s attention at page, he won’t mind scrolling through rest of the pages. So page 1 is the most important page in the resume.

At time I had the resume of 2-3 pages which failed to deliver the right kind of information to employer. However in spite of careful design this resume failed to catch attention. The basic reason was the total story and complete impression about the skills were missing.

I have critically reviewed many of the US formats which probably are not applicable for other countries. Resume carry a great importance in a country like Singapore where job agencies decide in a very weird manner which resumes they want to send to employers for interview and which resume will go to dustbin.

Typically keeping the resume on file concept does not exist in this country. These job agents are typically non-technical people and look for line by line matching of resume vs the job requirements. And if resume is missing even a single line time regarding requirements, you are likely not to hear from the employer. The weirdest thing about this country is that you will not hear rejection and you will never hear the reason of rejection too.

How do we overcome such non-technical job agents? Quite possibly we might have phrased the same requirements with different wording in the resume and this dumb job agent is not going to select your resume on the basis of “big words” which usually are specified by so called professional resume writers.  

One big example is if requirement is “proficiency in DOE” and if candidate’s resume indicate “proficiency in Six Sigma tools & Techniques”, there is all likely hood that his resume will not be shortlisted. Reason? Details on Six Sigma tools is missing, even if a qualified hiring manager can make sense. But how a job agent can make a sense?

To jump over this job agent’s fence, you have to integrate the proper “dumb” details in the resume. Reason, you can not make to interview until your resume cross over job agent’s general knowledge and lands on hiring manager’s table.

Coming back to right length of resume, there is another aspect. If you have a career spanning 10+ years, your achievements probably are much more than which can be condensed in 2-3 pages. If you are trying to condense, you are likely to loose some essential information. This is particularly true about senior technical executives who have provided internal and external consulting and have be on deputation on parallel additional duties.

A typical example is the technical professionals who have parallel additional responsibility on technical training too and after 10 years of successful track, at some point he may wish to encash upon his 10 years of technical training career and move into training. Such dual track careers are hard to fit into typical chronological career and condense it in 2-3 pages.

Another example is the technical professional having number of outstanding research publication which may be a positive feature of his skills. There are instances where professional have been using advanced tools like risk management, six Sigma and project management tools and many times these tools are positive features of the candidates.

Golden rule is:

1. Make your first page as marketable, put great summary and core competency on page 1. This is the most important page to put you into screen. If you design the first page to your best with action oriented words and key skills, no matter what is the length of your resume, job agent and hiring manager will go through all the pages of the resume.
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2. Include a section on skills, proficiencies and qualification from the perspective of a general job agent. Include as much detail as possible to catch maximum opportunities.