I get so pissed off with this Two page Myth that it is finally time to empty my colon. When an HR professional tells you a resume can only span two facing pages you can be certain of the following:
- They are lazy.
- Their company actively engages in age discrimination. (They will also reject “over qualified” candidates as part of their age discrimination.)
- Company uses cheap AI to pre-scan resumes. (Create a fancy resume with a picture and graphics on it like the featured image provided by Deviant Art to really make AI gag!)
- Company pays dramatically below market wages.
- Most importantly: The place is a shit-hole.
Lazy
During my twenties I dated multiple technical recruiters. As one of them who left recruiting to become a mortgage broker pre-Jamie-Dimon-economy-tanking-mortgage-fraud
It’s the second best job for a single girl. You meet them fact to face, know how much they make, company does a background check so you know if they really are divorced or not.
Former girlfriend and best friend for many years after
This was in the 1980s when every consulting firm mandated a face-to-face interview prior to working with you. It was also the time when everybody advertised IT positions in the Sunday Chicago Tribune. People mailed professional resume directly to firms or blind PO boxes provided by the Tribune. Everybody who knew how to get a gig put a Skills Summary or block on their resume. Even if you were not a fit the recruiter or their grunt would fill out an index card of your skills then file your resume in the massive cabinet. Later they got databases and spreadsheets, but it was pen and paper to start.
Generally there were enough knowledgeable IT workers who knew the system to avoid reading much of a resume. Grunts wouldn’t skim past the first two pages when filling out the index card.
The bigger firms made you do it
Yep, that was the other third of the multi-hour face-to-face interview before they would even present you to a client. They handed you a clipboard with all kinds of paperwork to fill out, including the “skills assessment” that would go into their system. Then you met with the recruiter. If you had shaved, showered, put on a suit, didn’t fart, and didn’t give off any immediate red flags, you then met with at least one account rep.
People with commodity skills: IMB-COBOL-CICS or VAX-BASIC or VAX-COBOL would generally meet with two or more account reps. This was the days where putting 40 people on a system project was ordinary. Sometimes the firm had full staffing authority. You only had to meet the manager at the client site to get credentialed on the system. Other times you left that office with one or more client manager interviews already scheduled.
They had “standard” rate ranges of $35-$55/hr and if you were willing to work on-site for that they usually didn’t wait for the full background check to present you. A couple of firms got burned by that, but most recruiters were skilled enough to ask the right questions. Even if you tried to paper over a stint in jail they could ferret it out.
Today
Most recruiters don’t even speak English. Most really horrible shops are using AI to pre-scan resumes. The rest got some freeware “grep” type utility and they put all of the resumes in a single directory. They start the utility, enter in a single keyword, then contact each and every person that pops up. Usually it is an autospam email.
I know this because I get 2-5 contacts every quarter looking for someone to design FDA approved sterile crush resistant packaging for medical devices. Why? I design software for medical devices and I create Debian/RPM packages for my OpenSource software. They search for “medical device” and “package” without ever actually looking at the resume.
The Two Page Myth only applies to shit-holes with cheap AI unable to process more than that. Grep utilities simply don’t care. They read ASCII files one line at a time and PDF is usually something like a page at a time. They will dutifully chew through every file in the directory tree.
Age Discrimination
Age discrimination is rampant in the IT world. Putting
3-5 years experience
in a job posting is actually illegal. You can say
3+ years experience
but you cannot cap the number of years. This is an illegal method of trying to hire a twenty-something and the Department of Labor is damned slow to criminally prosecute those doing it.
During the 1980s into the mid-1990s when massive IT projects ruled the land, you would work 4-7 years at each client site. Projects simply took that long. Around the 4 year mark about half the team would be let go because things were taking shape and there just wasn’t that much work left. Anyone with back-to-back stings of 6 months or less would find their resume shredded.
When PCs became corporate, 6 months was a long project. Not a lot of firms realized this so they missed out on good contractors. In the early 1980s there were a limited number of skills in each geographic market, at least until PCs got popular, then there was a new Rapid Application Development tool announced every other month or so it seemed. The grocery money was Midrange and Mainframe. COBOL, BASIC, and RPG with some CICS and ISAM thrown in.
Format
Adding insult to injury each geographic region and now every market segment wants a resume in a certain way. There is no “One Format to Rule Them All.” In the Midwest and definitely in the Medical Device market they want each project listed like this:
It’s not enough to have a skills summary block. They need to know what projects you last used said skills because they are both highly specialized and perishable.
No Gaps
Most people don’t realize that this is actually Age Discrimination. While many think it is just to identify people who sat on their ass until unemployment ran out before they started to look for a new job the “gap” they are really talking about is the gap between graduation and today. That’s why they demand your years of graduation from each college be on your resume. They try to determine how old you are by that year.
It’s really funny. A former manager of mine who became a good friend was older than me. He, however, spent a good 10-15 years after high school doing other things prior to going to college. His graduation date made him look real young. He kept bitching to me that he had great phone interviews and when they brought him in for face to face the job had suddenly closed.
“Dye your hair fool! Your resume makes you look almost 30 so look it!”
Yes, his hair was almost white, but he didn’t look that old otherwise.
Other Problem With No Gaps
You end up with a giant block like this at the end of your resume trying to keep it below 20 pages.
It is legitimate for an employer to want to know how many months you took off after graduation before finding a job when it is your first or second job. It is illegitimate 20 years into your career.
People who tell you to delete that are talking out the ass that sits on their shoulders.
Every 2-3 years I get a rash of calls from people wanting me to work on a LIMS system or, wait for it, CYBORG Payroll. I haven’t taken one of those gigs, mainly because I’m either not available when they call or they aren’t paying enough.
Less than 4 years ago I got a phone call from someone wanting me to fly to California to work on a PDP-11 system running RSTS/E. I kid you not. It was controlling a drug manufacturing system. As long as they didn’t replace it they never had to go through another expensive FDA approval process. This is hardware built in the 1970s. The year in front of and behind that I got two different calls for two different companies that were still running VAX (1980s) hardware.
Why do I get these calls? See comment about Grep utility above. At some point I will either be dead or I will be the last living human to have worked on these systems. If it is the latter, they have to pay what I want. Even if they bite the bullet and convert they will still have to pay what I want because I will be the only one that can decipher what they have.
Cheap AI – Is There Any Other Kind?
Any company using AI for recruiting is the kind of shit-hole no decent developer wants to work for, period. Google’s AI says black NAZI’s served in Hitler’s WWII army.
That’s definitely what you want to trust the future of your company with!
Right now it appears fancy resumes using a mix of graphics and fonts (Unicode and non-Unicode) causes the AI stuff to gag. Because of that, I plan to use more on my resume. I’m too skilled to work for a shit-hole. My resume is currently 6 pages long because The Two Page Myth doesn’t live here. Where it lives, I don’t want to work and neither should you.
Pays Dramatically Below Market Wages
Without exception, companies whose recruiters go on Social Media place like Quora spouting The Two page Myth pay dramatically below market wages. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just find out what company and search the online job portals, glassdoor, etc. Anyplace where you find scam artists and hucksters hawking bootcamps is where you will find recruiters for bottom feeding firms.
Two Page Myth Summary
As someone who has been in IT nearly 40 years now, starting out in the Golden Era where Junior Colleges had good IT programs and companies would hire you right out of them at the same market wages being advertised for full B.S. degree people when you hear someone in the hiring process spouting The Two Page Myth it is undeniably a shit-hole. Even if by some miracle it isn’t a shit-hole today, that hiring practice will turn it into a shit-hole in scant few years.
These companies also religiously put the “3-5 years experience” line in their postings even though it is illegal to cap years of experience. Universally they have exponentially high turnover. You will be asked to modify software they no longer have documentation for and the entire team that wrote it no longer works there. That’s when you will leave as well.
You should thank a recruiter that spouted this myth up front, because you definitely don’t want to work there.
