I recently phone screened a person who had a 25-page resume. This one was a real doozy. He had only 10 years of experience in development, which translates to two pages per year. One word of advice to people writing resumes out there: don’t make them too long. Just don’t. I’d say no more than 1 page per 2 years of experience, up to 5 pages max. Even if you’ve got 35 years of experience, your resume should be 5 pages max.
Ordinarily, this person would have gotten about 5 seconds of my attention before I threw their resume in the garbage, but this time around someone else was screening the resumes and had set up the phone screen for me, so the first time I saw their resume was 30 minutes before our already scheduled phone screen.
So I phone screened the guy anyway, just to see if my opinion about his resume was correct. And it was. By a long shot.
Here are several things a 25-page resume tells me this person lacks, without even having to read a single word in the resume. All of these things are critical skills for a professional of any kind, including a software developer:
Can not understand the needs of your user
What kind of hiring manager does he think has the time to read hundreds of 25-page resumes?
Can not succinctly and clearly communicate
This is probably self-evident, and is a super set of some more points farther down.
Can not prioritize
So maybe he thought everything on that resume was important. So what? Some of it has to be more important than other parts, and he wasn’t able to pick the most important from among them.
Can not optimize
A 25-page resume has lots of fluff in it that doesn’t need to be there.
Can not edit
In addition to fluff that doesn’t need to be there, he repeated the same information in several places.
Can not let go of ideas he thinks are ‘nifty’
The resume actually had a table to organize his experience. And catchy little blurbs about every company that were a full paragraph long. I think part of the problem was that he just thought all this stuff was cool and couldn’t bring himself to cut any of it. I’ve seen the same thing happen in code.
Has entirely too high an opinion of himself
What kind of (false) ego do you have to have to think someone wants to read 25 pages of text about you?
Trying to make up for a lack of substance with volume
Can not work within constraints
Maybe he had seen resume advice about keeping it short, but just couldn’t make himself follow it.