I was speaking with a friend and law colleague last week who'd taken a look at my resume and had some suggestions. She had many suggestions, actually.
One of her most striking comments was that I could be more detailed in explaining my skills, writings, and work experience by (dramatic pause) making my resume two pages. Two pages? While it makes some sense, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea. (Any lawyers out there make the jump to two pages? Write in and let me know what made you decide to brave the staple.)
Sometimes a multi-page resume is entirely appropriate. My experience in composing resumes started 14 years ago, when I helped design and edit what would become my father's final resume, before he started a business and later retired. That resume was two full pages describing his 30-plus years of engineering work. Using 11x17 parchment paper, we printed a title page on half of one side and the resume content on the other side, creating a professional-looking document when folded.
Doctors compose a curriculum vitae that would include lectures delivered, conferences attended, and research conducted. There's no stigma of length when it comes to a physician's CV, so someone my age might already have one around 5 pages.
But I'm a newly licensed lawyer, and one with limited experience. I'm 31, but you can subtract about 7 years of limbo from that number. I have one professional degree and speak only English well. I haven't been on the career fast track since 1997. It's hard to break the single page view when I feel like I haven't done enough.
But what the hell.
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5 comments:
My Career Services office strongly warned against the dangers of the multi-page resume. Try going to 11-point font.
That's another thing. My resume is already in 12 (for headings) and 10 point (for text) Times. This colleague also suggested enlarging the font to 12/11 or 13/12. I'm telling you, these suggestions blew my mind.
I say try it - have two resumes. I was in IT before I went to law school, and I had a 2 page resume b/c I knew that when I applied for a job, my resume was scanned into a database that was later searched for key words, languages, etc. Why not put it all in there?
In law school, I had two resumes. A one pager - sort of the highlights, with all the techie stuff abstracted out, and a two-pager (my "IP" resume) that had a little more detail on some of the tech stuff I had done. That worked well for me.
My career development dept. suggested customizing your resume for every firm/position, which I think is crazy talk. I think using your 2 page resume to write a kick-ass cover letter (like the lawmummy suggested) sounds more do-able.
It depends on how much you have to explain. I'm an editor who has frequently been placed in charge of massive projects. When you're an editor on the Web, no two jobs are quite the same. So I'm going to need some creativity the next time I give mine an overhaul. (Fortunately, we can put our resumes on the Web and do creative linking to flesh things out.)
For a lawyer? Probably not. If you want to focus on what you're written, then zip through the work history and give a nice list of your writings.
I guess I lost the nice long comment I wrote about this. I don't know what it's like for lawyers, but I just switched to a 2-pager a couple years ago and it has done well for me. I'm in sales and I needed something a little more detailed. I also do a fair amount of hiring and I can handle a 2-pager just fine as long as it's good strong, relevant stuff. I have to have 2 pages to list my publications.
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