This is one of the more frequently asked questions that I receive as job seekers want to know how long their resume should be.  Unfortunately I usually answer with “it depends”.  I don’t like this answer and neither do most of the people who ask the question.  I believe it depends on how many years experience you have.  As a rough rule of thumb, if you have less than 5 years of experience, you should be able to keep your resume to one page.  If you have over five years, it might be necessary to go onto the second page.  I use the word “might” as you are not required to have a two page resume if you have over five years of post-undergrad experience.

If you have determined you need to have a second page, make sure you fill the page entirely.  Don’t have a second page with three lines or bullet points on it.  If you needed that second page, then fill the majority of the page.  By looking at it from this point of view, you will  evaluate if you have enough important and relevant information to put on your resume to warrant a second page and you will trim some fat from the resume to clean it up if necessary.

What other advice have you heard?

vCrossroads made the Colorado Society of Certified Public Accountants publication, News Account, January/February 2011.



National Employment Situation Summary – November 2010:

The latest jobs numbers are out and non-farm payroll slightly increased 39,000 in November 2010.  This caused the unemployment rate to increase to 9.8%.    This brings the total of unemployed persons to 15.1 million.  This is an increase in unemployment which was hovering at 9.6% for the previous three months.

Long term unemployed (>27 weeks) barely changed at 6.3 million.  This is about 42% of the total unemployed population.

Read the full press release here – jobs_november2010

Colorado Unemployment:

Preliminary State and Regional numbers are out and Colorado’s unemployment will increase again according to the BLS, from 8.4% in October 2010 to 8.6% in November 2010.  The data is also showing that the number of unemployed persons is just shy of 230,000.  Year over year this is a 1.2% increase (in November 2009 unemployment was at 7.4%).

Whether you are actively seeking a new career opportunity or passively keeping a pulse, keeping this confidential is usually a high priority.  We want to ensure you that vCrossroads understands this and takes every measure to ensure your identity remains anonymous, unless you want to tell the world who you are.

We wanted to share with you that we have the utmost integrity and realize this is important to all of you.  We also wanted to pass this along as we are trying to create a community here and want to make sure you weren’t afraid to comment for our iPod Nano giveaway.  So here is what you need to do to make an anonymous comment:

1) Above the comment box you can click on the Disqus button to create an alias so nobody knows who you are.  Think of something fun and interesting. (Disqus is a popular commenting system used across many blogs and websites so you could use your alias at many websites across the great wide internet)

OR

2) You can just type your comment in the box and click “Post as…”.  This will create a pop-up that asks for your name and email.  Use your real email address – it won’t be displayed and create an alias instead of using your real name.  (It asks for your email so you can be notified if someone else comments on the same article.)

Now we can all comment and receive advice from each other without our actual identities being revealed.  In case you were wondering, mine is ‘MtnBiker’.  I hope to see many of you around.

We are excited to provide our 2^nd Annual Denver Accounting Salary Survey.

Our goal is to gather anonymous and accurate salary information for the Denver marketplace. We believe that our network of professionals will find it helpful to have access to this information.  The results will be shared in March 2011 on both the Emerson Search and vCrossroads websites.   We will also announce when we have compiled the results on our Facebook and Twitter pages.  The more people that participate, the more accurate the information will be!

Please take five minutes to fill this out and feel free to forward this on to any colleagues!  The salary survey will be closed on February 1, 2011.

To start the survey, please click here.