In my work helping young professionals craft their resumes and profiles, one question that I am asked all the time is to do with resume length. The question comes up in different forms:

“Can my resume be just one page?”

“I have too much to cover and my resume is spilling onto the third page. Is this okay?

“How can I expand my resume to be two pages?”

The answer? There is no right answer – it depends. You can tell I’ve been in consulting when I give you that answer! However, the truth is just that.

One resume that is making waves both on LinkedIn and other social media sites is Marissa Mayer’s resume. Mayer was, until recently, the CEO of Yahoo! Mayer’s resume broke several conventions for an executive resume. Firstly, her resume is a one pager. This is unheard of for an executive with a length history in different organization who has overseen many high profile projects. Mayer’s resume also went against the grain by including liberal amounts of purple, graphics for bullet points and even a pie chart.

Here is what her resume looks like:

I think Mayer can get away with a one page resume. She can use an off centre approach to market herself because of her public profile and because she works in the tech sector. I also don’t imagine that she would ever have to provide a resume when looking for a new opportunity given her public profile. For more traditional industries, this probably would not hold for candidates lacking a global profile like Mayer’s profile.

So how does a more typical candidate determine which length of resume is best?

Their experience

A no brainer for most. But it wasn’t for me. Right out of my MBA program, I converted my traditional two page resume into a one pager. I felt that given some of the industries I was targeting, as well as a competitive job market, a punchy one page resume that highlighted my biggest accomplishments would help me stand out. I was wrong.

When I had the opportunity to speak with a recruiter to elaborate on my experience, she was shocked to see how much was missing from my resume based on the experience I bring to the table. Because I chose to use the one page format, I was not able to show the range of roles and projects I worked on over the course of my seven years in the workforce. Using a one pager also prohibited me from elaborating on the projects and accomplishments I had included in my resume.

Typically, I advise job seekers to use a one page resume if they have fewer than three years work experience. This gives them enough space to highlight their accomplishments and also allows a busy recruiter or an HR specialist to stay engaged with their profile and not glaze over some of the candidate's biggest selling points that end up on page 2 (trust me on this as a former hiring manager).

Candidates with more than three years of experience, but under eight years, can usually highlight their experience within two pages. I have two tips for those within this experience range struggling to keep their resumes to two pages:

1. Highlight your most relevant experience for the position. If you are applying for different types of positions (eg: Project Manager and Business Analyst), you should really have two versions of your resume so you can cater to the different requirements for these roles.

2. For less relevant experience use one liners allow for a conversation when brought in for an interview. This is something I have also picked up recently. It is perfectly okay to cite past experience with simply your position (or type of role), the organization and dates of employment. This allows you to squeeze in more without inundating recruiters with a resume that looks like War and Peace.

The industry

For the vast majority of industries, a two pager is preferable to a one page resume. However there are a couple of industries in business that diverge from this rule of thumb.

The first industry is consulting. If you are coming out of an undergraduate program or are a newly minted MBA, consulting companies want to see your experience presented on a one page resume. I used this format last year and managed to pique the interest of a Big 4 consulting firm. While a one page resume is the gold standard for the Big 4 and other larger consulting companies, you can take the same approach when approaching boutique firms as the size of the firm does not determine the length of resume you should deploy.

The second industry that demands a one page resume is investment banking. The same rules apply as they do for consulting. What you need to highlight in your one pager is your financial experience and the results in terms of revenues you generated for your previous organizations. This differs from consulting where you can highlight either money generated or money saved, especially for the larger firms that have a wide range of service lines.

So there you have it – there is your roadmap to selecting your resume length. While there will always be outliers and exceptions to the rule as Marissa Mayer’s resume clearly conveys, you will have more consistent call backs and interest from firms if you follow the rules I outlined above. For the time being, I am going to stick to a two page resume. I’m staying open minded to this, you never know when you might become a household name!

The 5 traits every great leader needs

Throughout my career, I’ve been lucky to work with great people. This goes from the temporary worker (which I was one for a while myself) to all the way up to C-level management. As no one is a carbon copy of anyone else on this planet, each of them brought their own blend of strengths to work. I always have tried to take note about what they brought to their roles that distinguished them from everyone else. In some cases, they were model employees and shied away from former leadership roles. While others felt most comfortable in their own skin when they were placed in leadership roles. Either way, I found that there was a collection of traits that spanned the vast majority respected and looked at as true leaders within the organization.

I want to share with you today five traits every great leader needs:

They listen

In our information driven and jam-packed calendar world, it can sometimes feel there is more talking than mental processing of information. Leaders differentiate themselves in this way by being good listeners. There is a saying that is often mentioned but rarely adhered to – we were born with two eyes, two ears and only one mouth for a reason. I believe in our society there has been an overemphasis on verbal communication. Listening has been framed as passive, even though this is far from the true.

When you listen, you win. The best ideas do not come from one person (unless your last name is Da Vinci and your first name is Leo) but from a collection of great minds.

I’m going to blow the dust off an old game show to shed some light on this trait. When Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was riding high in its heyday, contestants had three lifelines: 50/50 (removes two wrong options out of a possible four), Phone a Friend or Poll the Audience. There was a lot of chatter about which lifeline was the most effective. I remember a lot of people thought phoning a friend (or even 50/50) was vastly superior to polling the audience. There was a misconception that asking the broader public about a piece of trivia would lead to the wrong answer. Studies have proven otherwise. Polling the audience was found to be correct a whopping 91% of the time compared to 65% of the time when asking a friend.

This applies to brainstorming ideas and coming up with solutions. To bridge ideas and use our collective creativity, knowledge and intelligence, we need to hear what others are bringing to the table. Great leaders I have worked made a point of listening to other stakeholders and using the best of their ideas with their own to come up with the ideal solution or course of action.

They reflect

Great leaders always make a point of reflecting. Reflection included the impact a leader makes, where one has performed well and fallen short as well as looking ahead to the future. This trait is one of the hardest to develop and immeasurably valuable. To reflect effectively, leaders need to have developed a foundation of self-awareness. By being honest with themselves, leaders can go from good to great by pinpointing areas they need to improve or make adjustments and create an action plan to address them.

One of the most effective methods of reflection is through journaling. Reflection, journaling “and all that yoga stuff” isn’t usually spoken in the same breath as leadership. But there are many good reasons why journaling helps shape great leaders. This is something with which I’ve had a spotty track record. I go for a couple weeks consistently journaling every night and then up to a month without touching my journal. I can tell you that I am always happier, more focused and motivated when I journal – and I rarely journal for more than three minutes a night! That’s pretty decent ROI if you ask me.

They Empower

One of the tougher experiences in the modern workplace is working for a manager and not a leader. A manager gets people to work for them, a leader gets people to follow them. There is a huge distinction and it plays out in many ways: motivation, productivity, team synergy and work culture. The way an employee goes from being a manager to a leader is by empowering their employees.

When I was in management, I would leverage the power of delegation. There were many instances when I onboarded an employee that was a superstar – they would eat new work for breakfast and come to me with an empty plate asking for it to be loaded up. They would always be curious and always trying to add value. What I did to keep my superstars motivated was delegate part of my work to them. The effect was twofold. My employees were more satisfied at their jobs from great challenges and delivered amazing results; I created more bandwidth for myself to work on IT transformation initiatives that added huge value to the organization. Win-Win.

They are courageous

Doing the right thing and doing what you are supposed to do should line up neatly. We all know this is not always the case. Many people will fall in line over speaking up when something does not jibe with them be it from an ethical, efficiency or customer satisfaction standpoint. A great leader has the courage to stand up for what they believe in and what they believe is the right thing to do.

They can say ‘I don’t know’

I find many people vastly underestimate the power to say ‘I don’t know’. If you think saying I don’t know makes you look incompetent, think again. You are doing yourself, the people you are working with and the organization a disservice if you fabricate an answer to a question just to look like you have it all together. News flash: no one knows everything.

Those working at C-level management should be able to answer most questions regarding vision or strategy but will likely defer to others when it comes to operational details (unless they are COO – and even then!). A frontline worker can likely walk you through all the intricacies of their system’s user interface but would refer you to their director when it comes to the department’s operations budget or quarterly cost savings.

So there you have it. Work on developing these traits and you will have a following in no time!

What traits do YOU think are critical in leadership?