AI tools can now index a CV, rank it and turn it into a report in seconds. Despite that, any recruiter worth their title still wants to read a resume personally, for two reasons: are you a suitable candidate, and if so, are you a memorable one? The real challenge for a job seeker is giving a recruiter enough to make that judgment properly, without burying it in unnecessary detail.

This is where things commonly go wrong. After ten, fifteen or twenty years in the workforce, a CV can turn into a running list of every job ever held, stretching to ten, fifteen, even twenty pages. It's the professional equivalent of a plate of pasta at midnight: nobody's finishing that. 

At best, an oversized resume overwhelms the reader with information they don't need. At worst, it signals that the candidate can't identify what's actually relevant or communicate it clearly.

So what's the ideal page count? That's the wrong question entirely. A tight two-page resume can say everything a recruiter needs to know. A six-page CV can be genuinely compelling from start to finish. Length isn't the measure of quality, relevance is.

The more useful habit is treating every resume update as a genuine edit, not just an addition. Rebalance what's included so it reflects what matters today, not what mattered a decade ago. Early achievements that once felt career-defining may no longer need the same space once more recent, more relevant experience exists.

It's also worth remembering who the document is actually for. It may be your career history, but it's being prepared for someone else's read. Keep it focused on the single job it's meant to do: getting you to the next stage of the process, not documenting your entire working life.