How to Cut Down Your Resume If Needed

If you find that your resume is long then you may want to consider trimming it down a bit. Read this to understand how long your resume should actually be.

Below are key points to what to remove from your resume if it is too long.

Hobbies and Personal Details. You can remove the hobbies, nationality, and even the photo. Many multinationals to do ask for them and in countries like the US or Europe it is considered "discriminatory".

It is not required to mention "references available on request" or even the names of your references in your resume at this stage. You can provide the details during the interview and if asked.

Remove filler words. Words like “a,” “an,” and “the” may seem small, but removing them across the entire document will save you a lot of space. You will need to reconstruct the sentence well. You can also replace "and" with "&".

Education. You can omit your GPA score, grade, etc. Your qualification, specialization, the university, and year of graduation/completion are sufficient. There is no need to provide a description in your education section.

Font type and size. Pick a font that is clear and easy to read. The best practice is to keep it between 10 and 12 pt fonts. A font size of 11 may be ideal.

Margins and line spacing. Look at your top to bottom and right-to-left margins. Also, optimize your line and paragraph spacing. This is a sure "space-saving" idea and hugely impacts your resume length.

More Achievements, less Description. Developing an achievement-based resume is ideal. Identify your top 10 responsibilities. Create an achievement on every point and if you do not have accomplishments then use a single line with keywords to state your job responsibility.

Page Space Utilization: Most resume contents tend to have more details towards to center and less on the extreme ends. Use the space from left to right as below