Choosing the right format and therefore the right number of pages for your CV is no easy task. If the trend is more towards the CV on a page, it is however not forbidden to lengthen it a little in certain cases.

We offer you a complete article to explain to you when and how you can present your CV on 1 or 2 pages.

And you, will your CV be on 1 or 2 pages?

All about the CV on one page

The CV on one page is almost mandatory for junior profiles, CVs without experience, or for student CVs. When it comes to resumes for people with more experience, the one-page template is widely preferred by HR, but as you’ll see below, there may be exceptions that prove the rule.

As a general rule, according to experts, with up to 5 years of professional experience, it is necessary to keep your curriculum vitae on one page only. If you spread yourself out and overdo it, you risk appearing pretentious in the eyes of recruiters, who by the way will only spend a few seconds looking at your CV. You must therefore give a tantalizing overview and above all make the reader want to meet you and find out more about you during the first interview.

The advantages of the CV on one page are various.

• By keeping your resume on one page, you allow the recruiter to read your document quickly, and thus, he can get an idea of your profile easily.
• The CV on one page is more easily readable than the one on two pages because the keywords or the skills stand out more easily.
• It forces the candidate to ask the right questions and to wonder if this or that information is really key for the position to which he is applying.
• Regarding the CV design, it is often more elegant and more modern to present his CV on a single page.

Now on to the drawbacks of the CV on one page.

• To want to summarize too much his career and his studies, the candidate can omit the essential.
• The CV may lack clarity and ease of reading if the font used is too small. So do not use a lowercase font just to make the content fit on a page.

To sum up, it is certainly necessary to condense the information about you, but without forgetting the essentials and the relevant information for the targeted job. If you think there are other crucial points that you need to mention in your CV but you don’t want to redo a two-page CV, for example, you could create a personal website or even just a page where you could highlight this information. . Thus, you refer the recruiter to a personal space where he can learn more about you. This option is also particularly recommended for creative professions, to show the extent of their talent.

All about the CV on two pages

The CV on 2 pages can be recommended for certain senior profiles with a great professional experience, but also certain professions such as researchers by example. If your professional experience includes a career of 10 years or more, the two-page CV is hardly a bad idea. Indeed, it will not be possible to condense to the point of being able to put everything on a single and unique page.

We mentioned the researchers above as an example, but this is also valid for scientists in general. These are areas in which candidates need more room to express all the research or publications made during their career. So sometimes it is even possible to expand the page count of a CV even further. The same goes for the doctoral CV. Indeed, academic CVs can be up to a maximum of 4 pages.

Let’s see together what advantages there can be in creating a CV on two pages.

• A CV on two pages is logically more airy than a CV on one page.
• It gives more space to candidates to express and even detail their skills as well as their qualifications and professional experience.

Among the disadvantages of the CV on 2 pages, we find the following points.

• The risk that the candidate will spread out and put futile information just to show that he has experience.
• The risk of lack of clarity of the document if the headings are not well structured or presented in an inappropriate order.

Note however that the first page of the CV must still present the most important information about you and that the second page must contain secondary information such as older experiences or interests for example.