Honestly I don't want to read narrative prose which is as likely to be a lie as anything else on the resume/CV. A half page might be fine if you've got a dozen CVs to look at for an ultra-specific role. If you just need a half-decent Golang developer and have 80 resumes that pass the initial screen? I'm not reading 40 pages of fluff, and if I'm not going to read all of its it's unfair to read any of it.
If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.
I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.
I already pointed out in my other comments that the first couple of pages is the resume but the details are given to consult as needed. This is how it should be since more details help one make better decisions. The current Recruiting/HR practices are broken which nobody seems to question. Human Resource is very important in this highly competitive economy where a single employee can change the entire future of the company, and yet people are using keyword searches, bullet point explanations and snap judgements for recruiting. Add in the fact that there is almost no training given to new employees nowadays which means it is even more important to recruit the right person.
You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.
A similar idea in a different ___domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
> You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making.
So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?
> A similar idea in a different ___domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations
Well first there is a huge difference between what Amazon says in public and what actually happens (like the Bullshit leadership principles especially the one about being the best employer). I can tell you from personal experience from actually working at Amazon that there were a lot of PowerPoint slides in internal meetings and especially when dealing with customers. I did my share of them.
Second, instead of using an analogy, we can actually talk about resumes at Amazon and how the hiring process works. No one ever submits 8 page resumes, nor does anyone in the hiring loop bemoan the fact that we only got 2 page resumes. I was on both sides of the hiring process there.
Never did they mention a word in the “Make Great Hiring Decisions” training program that they really like candidates to give them 8 page resumes.
Do you really want to keep bringing Amazon up as an example to someone who actually worked there?
> So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?
Yes, if only to confirm veracity. The mantra is "Trust but Verify".
The point of bringing up the Amazon example was to show a specific technique which works and has been adopted/validated by others. Amazon is a giant company and you were just one small cog in the wheel so pointing to your Amazon experience is not very convincing. This was not something imposed on every trivial meeting but for important strategic ones. There is good logic behind such a practice viz. helps to get the entire team on the same page w.r.t. some subject. Finally, i did not say that Amazon did the above for recruitment but suggested that recruiting in general would be far better if they (and everybody else) adopted such a logic.
If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.
I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.