One good thing about a single-page resume is you can fit it on a t-shirt.

 

Let’s face it, the one-page resume never seemed fair. After working years to build interesting, solid careers, job seekers were suddenly told to boil it all down to what would fit on a single, generously spaced 8 x 10 page. Resume writers often have to spend far more time figure out how to cut out their experience to fit than they do crafting useful descriptions of everything they’ve done.

Once, not so long ago, it was acceptable to document one’s career with two, three, even four pages. The idea wasn’t so much that a human resource staffer would necessarily read all of it, but if someone responsible for hiring a position was interested in a particular candidate and wanted to read a little deeper into his or her particulars, the information was there.

Somehow, that got replaced by the notion that no one in their right mind would read more than one page about any one person, even if that person was being considered for an important position. Once an important tool for providing an in-depth look at the history of a job candidate—and a useful reference point for interviewers—the resume has since become basically a quick and crude means of weeding out unqualified candidates.

But in 2010, the art of the resume is at a crossroads. Joe Grimm at Poynter Online does an excellent job of laying out some reasons that the one-page resume may be a thing of the past. Two important ones:

(1) People are doing more. The best are simply winning more awards, having more opportunities, changing jobs more frequently and earning more degrees than used to be the case. They can sustain quality into a second page. (2) Look on LinkedIn. It's hard to tell which resumes are one-pagers and which are longer. And when I see your digital resume on my computer screen, can't I blow up the type? The same thing happens when you e-mail me a resume. I can blow it up. Digital resumes are making the concept of "page" a little arcane.

Unfortunately, though, Grimm doesn’t think breaking the one-page convention is a safe bet—yet:

I have thought for a long time that the one-page rule should be dead. However, a lot of the people that like them are still alive. So, it is wisest to stick to one page. While I will not ditch a resume just because I have to turn to a second page, some of the recruiters I respect insist on the conciseness of one page. So, I have a one-page resume and you probably should, too.

Louise Kursmark at careerthoughtleaders.com says the one-pager isn’t going anywhere. In fact, she says, resumes will only continue to get shorter.

Resumes for people at all levels are by necessity becoming crisper and more to the point. Factors influencing this trend include the proliferation of smart phones and other hand-held devices with minuscule screens; the explosion of the social media site Twitter that condenses all messages to 140 characters; and the bombardment of multimedia messages and advertisements that constantly entertain, distract, and shift focus. Readers quickly lose interest in wordy resumes that don’t get right to the point.

It’s interesting that Kursmark thinks resumes will continue to get shorter for the same reason that Grimm thinks they will get longer: technology has taken away the boundaries of the printed page. Certainly Kursmark’s points about screen-size are legitimate, but as the iPad has shown us, smaller is not necessarily the wave of the future.