When you’re writing your first resume, there are plenty of questions that come up… and a popular one is about length – how many pages should your resume be?

Of course, this is subjective and depends on a number of factors but if you are looking for an internship or your first job, the answer is pretty much always the same.  Limit yourself to one page.

Why?

If you are in school or just graduating, your relevant experience is not going to take up more than one page… and you do want to keep it relevant.  Take this opportunity to edit.  Remove anything that is not relevant to your job search and/or outdated (i.e you may have had an awesome time as a mothers helper 3 summers ago, but it’s not exactly applicable to the PR Assistant role you’re applying for).

During the resume screening process, a recruiter is likely to spend about 30 seconds on each resume and you want the most significant info to shine through (and not be cluttered by “fillers”)

It will look nice & clean – my biggest pet peeve is a resume that goes onto page 2 by only a few lines… to me, this shows a lack of effort in formatting, which also shows a lack of attention to detail.  If you’re going off the page by a few lines and dont know how to further edit the content, play with the margins or font size.

Helpful Tip:  Always PDF… you never know if a recruiter is going to open your resume on a mac, pc, ipad, google image preview, etc.  Having your resume in pdf format will guarantee that no matter what device your resume is viewed on, it is formatted exactly as you intended.  There are quite a few free sites out there (like http://www.zamzar.com/) that will allow you to convert your word docs to pdf.  Sometimes when applying through a system, it won’t allow .pdf resumes so keep a .doc and a .pdf version handy.