Right length for your country

How long should a resume actually be?

The honest answer is that length is a symptom, not a rule. A two-page CV is not worse than a one-page CV; a CV that takes two pages to say one page of things is. What follows is what the length conventions really mean, and when to ignore them.

One page

Right for roughly the first five to eight years of a career, and for anyone applying in a market where one page is the strong default — consulting, investment banking, most US graduate schemes. The constraint is useful: forcing yourself onto one page is the fastest way to discover which of your bullets were never earning their space.

Two pages

The normal length for an experienced professional in the UK, Ireland, Australia and most of Europe. Recruiters expect it and will not penalise it. What they will penalise is a second page carrying four lines, or a second page that is mostly a skills inventory. If page two does not contain substantive work history, cut back to one.

Three pages or more

Justified in three situations and rarely otherwise: academic CVs with publications, medical and clinical roles with procedure logs and registrations, and senior technical roles where a project list is genuinely the evidence. If you are outside those, a third page usually means the early career section was never compressed.

What to cut first

In order, because the order matters:

1. Anything older than about fifteen years, compressed to one line each or a single “Earlier roles” entry. Nobody is assessing you on a job from 2007.
2. Duties that were implied by the job title. “Responsible for managing a team” under a role called Team Manager tells a reader nothing they did not already know.
3. Skills lists that repeat the bullets. If a tool appears in three job descriptions, it does not also need a line in a skills block.
4. The objective statement, unless you are changing field and it genuinely explains the change.
5. References available on request. It has been assumed for twenty years.

Cut in that order and most CVs lose a third of their length without losing a single thing a hiring manager wanted.

Length and applicant tracking systems

A common worry: does a longer CV hurt you with an ATS? Not directly — parsers do not score on length. What hurts is what people do to force a document shorter: shrinking type below about 10pt, cutting margins to nothing, or replacing text with a graphic. Small type and cramped margins make the document unreadable on a phone, which is where a large share of first reads now happen, and text inside an image is invisible to a parser entirely.

If you need space, cut content. Do not compress typography.

Country conventions worth knowing

• United States: one page is a strong norm below senior level. No photo, no date of birth, no marital status — employers frequently discard CVs carrying them on legal advice.
• United Kingdom and Ireland: two pages is standard and expected. No photo.
• Germany, Austria, Switzerland: two pages, and a photo is conventional rather than risky — the opposite of the anglophone markets.
• Netherlands: two pages, no photo needed, and English is widely accepted for international roles.
• Academia, anywhere: length is unbounded. A publication list is the point of the document.

If you are applying abroad, the convention that matters is the one where the job is, not the one where you are. Our visa sponsorship job board has a guide page for each country we cover.