How long should a CV be?

There is no universal rule, and anyone stating one confidently is describing their own country's convention.

By career stage

Student or graduate: one page. You have not yet done enough to fill two honestly, and padding is obvious.

Two to ten years: one or two pages. Two is normal. Do not stretch to two if you have one page of substance.

Ten years or more: two pages. Compress the early roles to a line each. Nobody needs the detail of a job you left in 2011.

Academic or medical: as long as it needs to be. A CV including publications, grants, conference presentations and clinical rotations runs to many pages by convention, and that is expected.

By country

• US and Canada: one page is strongly preferred, two acceptable for senior roles. Called a résumé.
• UK, Ireland, Australia: two pages is the norm.
• Germany, France, much of Europe: two pages, often including a photo and date of birth.
• Bangladesh, India and much of South Asia: two pages typical; three tolerated for senior roles.

If you are applying internationally, follow the convention of the country you are applying to, not the one you are in.

How to cut a CV that has grown

In this order:

1. Delete duties, keep achievements. "Responsible for payroll" adds nothing that the job title did not already say.
2. Compress old roles. Anything more than ten years back becomes one line: title, employer, dates.
3. Cut the skills list. Twenty skills is not more impressive than eight; it just dilutes them.
4. Remove the obvious. Microsoft Word. Email. "References on request."
5. Then, only then, adjust the layout. Reducing text size and spacing by a few percent recovers a surprising amount of space.

That order matters. Shrinking the type on a CV full of duty lists produces a cramped CV full of duty lists.

Length is a symptom

A CV that will not fit usually has a selection problem rather than a space problem. The question is not "how do I fit this in" but "which of these does this employer need to know".

In the builder, the spacing and text-size sliders under Design handle the last five percent — after you have made the cuts above.