A word about résumés.

The problem with resume advice is that everyone who does interviews eventually develops their own set of strongly-held, essentially arbitrary beliefs about every aspect of the hiring process. It's all ultimately about finding reasons to toss resumes in the trash, until you get down to the handful of candidates that can be reasonably evaluated by one person.

Back when I still deigned to work for other people, I had an extensive and successful resume. I started out with a one page resume, and kept it that way for the first 5 years of my career. Then at some point, I kept getting asked silly questions by recruiters (not in house but the independent agencies) and they'd often say "you should put this on your resume. You should list every language you've worked with, all your skills. And tells us more about each company you worked for.

I was able to hold the line at a 2 page resume, but I optimized the hell out of it.

Finally, I got really irritated and re-worked it again to be a single page.

The resume looked something like this- . . .

MYNAME@gmail.com -- huge letters across the top. the only contact info on the resume

Summary 18+ years of software development experience.... going on for about a paragraph, that really gives my "value offered" rather than "this is what I'm looking for". This was succinct and compelling and I think many people never read further.

Then a cronological list of jobs in this format:

JOB TITLE @companydomian.name date-now Patent #444,444,444 "Title of Patent", sole inventor One-two sentences highlighting significant accomplishments there. Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Perl exit: need more challenge

and at the bottom: copyright - do not forward or alter this resume, no agency may represent me. . . .

This worked really well. Let people see the tech I used, why I left each position, what I did there, and what my title was.

That last line was because I was constantly finding my resume retyped (very poorly) by agencies that wished to send it out, often who got it under fraudulent terms (they made a job posting pretending to be the company rather than an agency). They'd do this just to remove my contact info at the top lest the company contact me directly.

Eventually I stopped dealing with agencies.

In fact, don't give your resume or even talk to anyone who isn't a hiring manager, or a friend of yours at the company. HR people are just going to prevent you from getting a job. Agencies are just going to say things like "You built a search engine? that's nice. Were you using Oracle 15?" "No, I was working in Java, and some SQL, I think the backend was Oracle 14" "Oh, sorry, they really want Oracle 15 experience".

And of course, when a bimbo airhead (often male with some sort of ego involvement) has decided that you're not qualified because your buzzword compliance is 6 months out of date, there is no convincing them.

So, I decided they just got in the way, and started networking.

This was so much better-- stopped getting jobs and job offers, but opportunities. Started interviewing for CTO positions rather than "Sr. Developer".

YMMV.

I agree with you, particularly about interviewing - that the hirer will often have arbitrary beliefs and standards. But I'm not so sure about resumes. While inevitably there is some arbitrary nit-picking and subjective preferences, I would be willing to bet that there are a good few universals. For a business resume, I think no more than a page is one of them. I've edited many resumes and there's a number of guidelines for success that I make sure people follow.

Also, I bet if you were to take a large number of different recruiters for the same type of position and hand them a stack of resumes, they would mostly pick out the same few as stand-outs.

I've been sending out resumes recently looking to move to a new position.

So far I've seen multiple companies outsource their application tracking systems. When it comes to submitting the resume the options available are either Doc Upload or Copy and paste text into a textfield.

I went to an interview and they had printed my resume from the text field. Formatting made the thing unreadable and unfortunately I don't own a printer* so I didn't have a nicely formatted copy with me.

I'm going to invest in a copy of MS Word. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it and exporting to Doc is unreliable, even reopening the same file in Oo.org. There are too many companies I'm interested in who don't take PDFs that it's becoming a problem.

Meanwhile I'm interviewing candidates for an open position at my current office and I love the people who submit PDFs.

* Didn't even remember getting rid of it. I must have thrown it out years ago. Hello paperless office.

Bingo. Also known as bikeshedding or more formally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality