It’s easy to search for resume tips, but too many of them come back; it’s unlikely they’re all right.
So I started looking for scientific papers in the area to see if anyone had studied it systematically. Eventually the Google keywords [evidence based job search] turned up a review paper that looked useful and that I had access to:
Liu, Songqi, Jason L. Huang, and Mo Wang. 2014. “Effectiveness of Job Search Interventions: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Psychological Bulletin 140 (4): 1009–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035923.
Working outwards from there, I’ve found that we’re pretty sure about:
Writing
Competency statements (Bright and Hutton, 2000) work. They work well enough that copy-pasting them into resumes meaningfully boosted how managers rated them in a systematic survey.
Length
I’ve not been able to find a decision rule for “how long should I make my resume,” but it’s increasingly seeming like the answer is “as short as possible.”
Recruiters sometimes only turned out to have shortlisted one page resumes (Lipovsky, 2014), and studies that varied design (Wilgenburg, 2017; Uskaurs, 2018) used one page resumes exclusively.
Bright and Hutton, which varied content and left design fixed, used two page resumes and a cover letter.
No one asked recruiters to look at three page resumes, presumably because the response rate would have been too poor to publish.
Design
Design risks rarely paid off when studied, although the relationship between design and outcomes is difficult to describe. Reportedly, it may depend on:
- fashion, with (Arnulf et al., 2010) finding creative resume designs uniformly underperforming traditional ones, and later studies turning up more qualified answers
- intelligibility, with (Lipovsky, 2014) finding recruiters selected organized resumes
- the length of time a recruiter looks at your resume, with shorter review times favoring splashy resumes (Wilgenburg, 2017)
- the position applied for, with creative positions favoring creative resumes, and others favoring restrained, one column layouts (ibid; Uskars, 2018)
The best we can say is there’s more evidence for investing time in writing and proofreading than in visual design. Unless you’re applying for a design position, focus on making an easy to follow resume, with one column or one column and a sidebar, and move on.
References
Arnulf, Jan Ketil, Lisa Tegner, and Øyunn Larssen. 2010. “Impression Making by Résumé Layout: Its Impact on the Probability of Being Shortlisted.” European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 19 (2): 221–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320902903613
Azrin, N. H., T. Flores, and S. J. Kaplan. 1975. “Job-Finding Club: A Group-Assisted Program for Obtaining Employment.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 13 (1): 17–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(75)90048-0.
Bright, Jim E. H., and Sonia Hutton. 2000. “The Impact of Competency Statements on Résumés for Short‐listing Decisions.” International Journal of Selection and Assessment 8 (2): 41–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2389.00132.
Higgins, Chad A., and Timothy A. Judge. 2004. “The Effect of Applicant Influence Tactics on Recruiter Perceptions of Fit and Hiring Recommendations: A Field Study.” The Journal of Applied Psychology 89 (4): 622–32. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.4.622.
Lipovsky, Caroline. 2014. “The CV as a Multimodal Text.” Visual Communication 13 (4): 429–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357213497869.
Liu, Songqi, Jason L. Huang, and Mo Wang. 2014. “Effectiveness of Job Search Interventions: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Psychological Bulletin 140 (4): 1009–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035923.
Uskaurs, Matiss. 2018. “The Impact of a Resume on a Job Interview and First Impression.” Edited by Thomas Sabel. Vaasa University of Applied Sciences. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/834c681f76b20b6928f17f3218834c7aa5941e05.
Wilgenburg, Florence van. 2017. “The Impact of Creativity in Resume Shortlisting.” Edited by dr Ruud Koolen. Masters in Communication and Information Sciences, Tilburg University. http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=145069
