I will hit you with a statistic - on average, experienced recruitment consultants can analyze a resume in 6 seconds. This lends to the belief that these consultants scan and look for key information to make a decision to do a deeper dive into a jobseeker’s career history.
Compared to human recruiters, Artificial Intelligence can read an entire resume word for word a million times faster while looking for a good level more of information that enables it to make an accurate match against a job in order to shortlist. So it begs the question, does resume length matter in the hiring process when trying to get past AI first?
Well, there are limits. Would a two-page resume rank higher than a one-page resume, or even still would a three-page resume trump them all? There are many factors to consider here such as:
Resume Format: Large gaps, layout design, and text size are not a way of making a resume into two pages and claiming the AI hasn’t been fair to you, as AI strictly goes by information, not by blank spaces and large words. This isn’t a college term paper - AI will know if you’ve made the periods on the page a larger size than the rest of the text.
Rubbish In Rubbish Out: What is the quality of what’s written on the resume? Yes we could all write two pages of non-specific garbage that again, we could claim is a long written resume, but this translates to a lot of nonsense for AI which will be disregarded. AI works on good inputs; so if a resume has good content, clear dates, relevant companies, skills, and experience this will play the dominant role within the success of the candidate, not necessarily the length of the resume itself.