Optimal Resume Length

The resume design service Novoresume recently made a splash by fitting Elon Musk’s career onto a single page, illustrating that the most successful and widely-varying careers can be concisely summarized.

With that in mind, we examined our internal data to investigate whether there is an optimal resume length, and we discovered that indeed there is:

Based on many thousands of applications submitted via untapt, primarily to software engineering roles requiring two to five years of experience, we observe that the optimal length of a work experience section is 250 to 350 words. At this length, we have historically seen 36.0% of job-seekers invited to interview.

Outside of this optimum, the probability of invitation to interview drops off gradually. At the extremes, interview invitation rates are the lowest. Scant applications, with fewer than 50 words in the experience section, have a statistically-significantly lower success rate (23.6%) according to Pearson’s chi-squared test (p < .05). Similarly, the lengthiest applications (600+ words) succeed a significantly lower 27.8% of the time(p < .05).

To illustrate an extreme example, we created a density plot of the probability of applications being invited to interview if they have no experience listed:

The orange bar represents the minimum score threshold software engineers must be above to submit a job application on untapt; nearly all applications without experience are below this.

Compare that with the density plot for applications with at least 500 characters of experience:

The vast majority of these applications are above the orange threshold.

So, the takeaway is, when revising your resume aim for the sweet spot of 250–350 words.

Thanks to Gabe Rives-Corbett for the inspiration and improving the analysis. Thanks to Donald Whalen for his ever-useful edits.