Resume Length

Q: How do you make a statue of an elephant?
A: You start with a giant block of stone and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

A ridiculous riddle, but I read that as a kid and it has always stuck with me.

As we dive into the following pages of the book, I would encourage you to do one thing: build an ENORMOUS resume.

List every skill, every library or tool you’ve used, every project no matter how mundane, every job you’ve ever had.

This could easily result in a resume which is many, many pages long. It will actually resemble the typical “CV” format used in other parts of the world.

For a typical American/Canadian resume, you will make a copy of your enormous resume for each job to which you’re applying. Then trim down that copy to one page by “chipping away” everything that doesn’t make you look like the best candidate for the job.

It will typically take several hours to produce this enormous resume and get the formatting correct. Editing a copy of this to make you look most suitable for that next job could take as little as 20 minutes.