Length, format, and the things that do not matter

A surprising amount of confident advice is about nothing.

The two-page rule is advice, not a rule, and it varies by field, seniority and country. What matters is that the relevant material is early and the document does not contain filler. A three-page document that is dense with relevant evidence performs better than a two-page one padded to look substantial.

Formatting matters only to the extent that it affects extraction speed. Clear headings, consistent dates, adequate white space and a legible size do real work. Design elements, colour, columns, icons and photographs mostly do not, and columns in particular can cause problems for automated parsing.

Several conventional inclusions are simply obsolete in many markets: a statement that references are available on request, a full postal address, a date of birth, a marital status, a photograph. In some jurisdictions personal characteristics should be omitted deliberately because their presence introduces bias the process is supposed to exclude, and conventions differ enough between countries that local practice should be checked.

The objective standard is whether a reader can, in ten seconds, say what you do, what you have done that is relevant, and where you have done it. Anything that helps with that matters, and everything else is discretionary.

There is one formatting decision that genuinely matters and is routinely got wrong, which is the file itself. A document sent in a format that reflows unpredictably, or that embeds fonts the recipient does not have, can arrive looking nothing like what was sent, and the sender never finds out. Sending a fixed-layout file, unless a specific format is requested, removes an avoidable and invisible failure.