“How many years of experience should I include on my resume?”
“How long should my resume be?
“How much space should I allocate for each role?”

These are just a few of the many questions clients have about the mechanics of crafting their resumes. Writing or updating a resume can be a challenging exercise when looking back across your career and trying to select the best highlights to fit into a limited amount of space. It’s not an easy process both from a storytelling and structural standpoint. I fielded all the questions above and many more as a Career Advisor at a company supporting mid to senior-level executives with their job search and career development. Over 5 years and 6,000+ calls spent critiquing resumes in that role, I realized that all these questions surrounding how to structure your resume content were best summarized by the same three guidelines, in this specific order:

1. Relevancy

2. Recency

3. Tenure

3 Guidelines to Structure Your Resume Content

Relevancy

By far, the most important criteria regarding what belongs in your resume is relevance. This may sound obvious, but many recruiters I know often complain about the number of resumes they receive that seem utterly disconnected from the roles they are trying to fill. I consider relevance, both the overarching and overriding rule that should guide anyone writing their resume. Simply put, if any piece of information on your resume does not positively serve to demonstrate your fit or ability to perform a job you’re targeting, it doesn’t belong. 

Including irrelevant or weak supporting information on a resume does your candidacy a major disservice by communicating to your target audience that you either don’t understand the role you are applying to well enough to supply appropriate information, or didn't care enough to make the effort. They could be wrong on both counts, but if they have to dig to find the relevant substance -- they will stop looking. 

Having the following question in mind as you are considering adding or removing information to your resume can help with your self-editing process:

“Will this story or piece of information help me secure the job I am targeting?”

If the answer is, “yes”’ then proceed. If the answer is either, “no,” or “maybe,” then carefully evaluate its necessity and if its inclusion can be defended in your resume. Not everything you have done in your past is directly related to a target role, but as long as you are showing transferrable skills and/or achievements, then it counts as relevant for building your case. Tailoring your resume to offer up only the most salient/relevant details of your career story is your ultimate aim when crafting a successful resume. 

Recency

Do you remember that old Janet Jackson song, “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” Well, I have a strong feeling that it’s the tune that many employers have in their heads while they are reviewing resumes. This ties into the psychological phenomenon of the “recency effect/bias,” which posits that more recent information is better remembered and receives greater weight when forming a judgment than earlier-presented information. This makes sense in the context of business given that market forces and consumer trends don’t stay static, but are constantly evolving. Your achievements from 5+ years ago, while impressive -- and relevant -- may not be as compelling as achievements within the past 1-3 years. 

Given this recency bias, it’s important to ensure that you place adequate emphasis on describing your achievements within your most recent roles. Especially if you are looking to progress within the same field and/or function, your latest and greatest will likely be more influential. Another factor to consider is your level of seniority. For example, your recent achievements as a key account manager are certainly more important to stake your claim for a sales director role than your wins as an account specialist. You can allot space on your resume to account for the seniority of roles, giving more real estate to your more senior/recent roles. While it’s important to show a consistent track record of achievement throughout your career, you control your narrative and can bias it in favor of your recent impacts, which are likely most relevant for what you are targeting next.

“But what if my best or most relevant achievements are in a past role?” 

Those past achievements still belong on your resume and should be well documented if they help you make the case for what’s next or in the case that you’re trying to return to something you have previously done. You can restructure your resume to break reverse chronology by presenting your most relevant experience at the top of your experience section, so your audience doesn’t have to search for it. I will discuss this in more detail in a future post.

Tenure

I’ve seen hundreds of resumes in which the length of time that a job seeker spent in various roles bore little to no relation to how much space they allocated for each within their resume. If you spent 2 years in one role and 4-5 years at another -- why should they occupy an equal amount of space on your resume, let alone the shorter role take up more? I have seen this far too often and it can pose challenges to resume construction by causing you to prematurely run out of room due to improper weighting of information. While in some cases, it’s possible to have had greater impacts in a shorter time at one company versus another, typically with more time in a role comes more achievements to discuss. Using the length of your tenure in each role can be a useful measure to gauge how much space you should allocate for it on your resume. There is no magic number of bullet points — just know that a meatier role should have more meat.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Ultimately, if the content of a role you held for 6 years is not as relevant to a job you’re targeting as a role you held for 3, then the latter role assumes the primacy of your resume’s focus. And there you have it, relevancy returning as the key factor that directs your actions regarding your resume content.

Taken together, relevancy, recency, and tenure work in concert as guidelines to help you determine how to best structure, allocate space, and select the content in your resume. When it comes to the number of years of experience to include, the most recent 10-15years of experience are usually what most employers are looking for. Beyond the 15-year mark, decisions have to be made on an individual basis as to what and/or how much to include. The rules on resume length are beginning to relax, though two pages is usually sufficient for most job seekers. However, if you have 3 pages worth of spot-on content that makes your case, I would rarely advocate for you to sacrifice your story for the sake of brevity.

Resume writing can certainly feel unwieldy, but with these guidelines, you will certainly feel like you have more control.

If you would like to discuss how to structure compelling resume content, I’d love to support you! BOOK NOW for a free resume consultation.

niiato@avenircareers.com | Call/text 917-740-3048