Hi! Welcome to my Blog. I like to use my experience as both a Certified Résumé Writer and administrator in charge of the candidate selection and interview process for my department to share helpful tips that I have picked up along the way. This blog will be updated frequently. I hope you enjoy it! Positive Testimonials and remembering to “Like” my Facebook page are GREATLY appreciated.
5 Ways to Determine How Far Back To Go On A Resume
This blog post is more geared toward seasoned professionals with a lengthy list of past experiences. The question always comes up as to how far back should a resume go in detailing previous experience. There are a few guidelines that I follow while making this decision because there isn’t one concrete rule since all situations are different. Here are my top 5 things to consider when choosing how far back to go on your resume.
- FCS Rule of Thumb. Employers Focus on the past 5 years, Consider the last 10 years, Scan anything before that. This would imply that going back 10 years is a good guiding principle to keep in mind.
- Getting Repetitive. The further back you go and the more positions that you include, the more likely it is that information will become repetitive. One goal of a resume should always be to optimize impact and space by having each bullet point add value. If each of your responsibilities for a position 12 years ago have been mentioned in more recent positions, then there really isn’t a need to provide details for that job.
- Burying Critical Information. Since the majority of resumes have professional experience near the beginning of the resume, that means that most information will come after. Burying impressive honors, awards, publications, etc. too deeply may cause a potential employer to miss them altogether. This goes back to making sure that everything you include is adding value to your resume.
- Losing Relevance. Career paths and goals tend to change over long periods of time. If you are going to list detailed information about an older position, make sure that it is still relevant to your current career path.
- Compromise. Many job seekers that have been working in the same field for 20+ years believe that there is value in that type of experience. I agree and want to make it clear that I’m not saying that you shouldn’t list those older positions at all, if nothing else they demonstrate that you have been consistently employed. I am simply saying that you don’t need to take up critical space repeating information that can be found in more recent roles. In these cases, I like to incorporate an Early Career Summary section where I still list job titles and companies without including bullet point lists of responsibilities.
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Greg Ryan Resume Writing 