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!