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Create ResumeA CV in the UK should usually be two pages long. That is the safest, most accepted length for most professionals, especially if you have more than a couple of years of experience. A one page CV can work for school leavers, graduates, early career candidates, or people with very limited experience. A three page CV can be acceptable for senior leaders, technical specialists, academics, contractors, consultants, and people with complex project or industry experience.
But here is the part most candidates get wrong: CV length is not really about pages. It is about relevance, evidence, and decision speed. Recruiters and hiring managers do not reward longer CVs. They reward CVs that help them understand quickly why you fit the role.
For most UK job applications, your CV should be:
One page if you are a school leaver, student, graduate, intern, apprentice, or very early career candidate
Two pages if you are a professional with relevant experience, which covers most UK candidates
Three pages only if your background genuinely needs extra space because of seniority, technical depth, publications, projects, contract work, or complex career history
If you are asking, “Can my CV be more than two pages?” the answer is yes, but only if every part of the third page earns its place.
A weak three page CV usually means the candidate has not prioritised. A strong three page CV usually means the candidate has a complex background and knows exactly what the reader needs to see.
That distinction matters.
When I screen CVs, I am not thinking, “How many pages is this?” first. I am thinking:
Can I understand this person’s fit quickly?
The two page CV is common in the UK because it gives enough room to show professional experience without turning the document into a career autobiography.
Hiring is not a reading exercise. It is a risk assessment.
The recruiter is trying to decide whether you are worth progressing. The hiring manager is trying to decide whether your experience looks credible enough for interview. The ATS may scan your CV for keywords and structure, but human beings still need to understand it.
Two pages usually gives you enough space to include:
A focused professional profile
Key skills relevant to the job
Recent and relevant work experience
Measurable achievements
Education and qualifications
Technical tools, systems, or certifications where relevant
Is the most relevant information easy to find?
Are they showing evidence, or just listing responsibilities?
Does the CV feel focused for this role?
Am I being made to work too hard to find the point?
A two page CV full of vague waffle is worse than a sharp three page CV with strong evidence. But a focused two page CV will usually beat both.
Enough context to understand your level and scope
The mistake many candidates make is treating two pages as a strict design rule rather than a communication rule. They shrink the font, remove spacing, squash margins, and create a CV that technically fits two pages but feels like reading a legal document during a migraine.
That is not a win.
A good two page CV should feel selective. It should look like you understand what matters for the job. It should not feel like you panicked and tried to squeeze your entire career into the margins.
A one page CV is not automatically better. This is one of those pieces of advice that sounds clean and confident, but becomes dangerous when applied blindly.
A one page CV can work well if you have limited experience or a very simple career history. It can also work in some creative or highly targeted cases where the CV is more of a concise profile than a full career document.
But for many UK professionals, a one page CV creates a different problem: it removes the evidence.
Recruiters do not shortlist candidates because they have a neat CV. They shortlist candidates because the CV gives them enough confidence to believe the candidate can do the job.
A one page CV may be too short if it forces you to remove:
Specific achievements
Relevant responsibilities
Industry context
Systems, tools, or technical knowledge
Management scope
Project details
Commercial outcomes
Evidence of progression
This is where candidates accidentally weaken themselves. They hear “keep it short” and interpret that as “remove detail”. But hiring decisions depend on useful detail.
There is a big difference between a concise CV and an underdeveloped CV.
A one page CV may be right if you are:
Applying for your first job
A school leaver or college student
A recent graduate with limited work experience
Applying for internships, placements, or apprenticeships
Making a simple part time job application
Returning to work with limited recent employment history
Submitting a highly targeted CV for a very specific opportunity
Even then, one page does not mean empty. It should still show your skills, education, projects, volunteering, work experience, and any evidence that you can perform in the role.
A one page CV should feel sharp, not thin.
Yes, a CV can be three pages in the UK, but it needs a good reason.
A three page CV is not a crime. Recruiters are not sitting there with a red buzzer ready to reject anyone who dares to cross page two. That said, many three page CVs fail because the extra page is filled with old responsibilities, repeated duties, irrelevant training, and job descriptions copied from the candidate’s past roles.
The third page should add value, not volume.
A three page CV may be acceptable if you are:
A senior executive or director with substantial leadership scope
A technical specialist with complex tools, platforms, methodologies, or certifications
A contractor with multiple relevant assignments
A consultant with project based experience across clients
An academic, researcher, medical professional, or scientist
A project or programme leader with major delivery examples
A candidate in engineering, IT, data, finance, law, healthcare, or regulated industries where detail matters
Applying for roles where technical evidence is more important than visual brevity
The question is not, “Is three pages allowed?”
The question is, “Would the reader understand my suitability less clearly if I cut this down?”
If the answer is yes, three pages may be justified. If the answer is no, cut it.
Candidates often assume recruiters read CVs from top to bottom. In reality, most recruiters scan before they read.
That does not mean recruiters are lazy. It means recruitment is a high volume decision process. A recruiter may be comparing dozens or hundreds of CVs against a role that has specific requirements, salary expectations, location constraints, notice periods, and hiring manager preferences.
The first scan is usually about fit.
I am typically looking at:
Your current or most recent job title
The companies and industries you have worked in
Your level of responsibility
Whether your experience matches the role brief
Your key skills and technical tools
Your achievements and evidence
Your career progression
Any obvious gaps, jumps, or mismatches
Whether the CV is clear enough to send to a hiring manager
This is why length alone does not save or ruin a CV. A two page CV can still fail if the top half of page one is weak.
The first half of page one carries a lot of weight. That is where the reader forms their first working assumption about you. If that space is filled with generic profile language, vague soft skills, and no clear positioning, you are wasting the most valuable part of the CV.
A strong CV makes the reader think, “I can see why this person is relevant.”
A weak CV makes the reader think, “I need to dig to understand them.”
Recruiters do not love digging. Hiring managers love it even less.
The best CV length is the shortest version that still proves your fit properly.
That sentence matters.
Not the shortest version. Not the longest version. The shortest version that still does the job.
Your CV needs enough substance to answer the employer’s silent questions:
Have you done this type of work before?
At what level?
In what environment?
With what tools, systems, clients, teams, budgets, or responsibilities?
What impact did you have?
Is your experience recent enough?
Can I justify inviting you to interview?
A CV that answers those questions clearly can be two pages, sometimes one, sometimes three.
A CV that does not answer those questions is not strong, even if it is beautifully formatted.
This is where a lot of candidates misunderstand CV writing. They think the CV is a document about their career. It is not. It is a decision support document for the employer.
Your CV is there to make a hiring decision easier.
That means every section should help the reader understand your suitability. If it does not support the decision, it is probably taking up space.
A strong UK CV needs to be selective. The goal is not to include everything you have ever done. The goal is to include the information that makes you credible for the role you want next.
Your profile should be short and specific. Usually, three to five lines is enough.
Avoid generic phrases like “hardworking professional with excellent communication skills”. That tells me almost nothing. Most candidates claim to be hardworking. Nobody writes, “I am unreliable and difficult in meetings,” although it would make recruitment more entertaining.
A better profile explains:
Your professional identity
Your industry or functional background
Your level of experience
Your strongest relevant skills
The kind of value you bring
Weak Example:
“An enthusiastic and motivated professional with excellent communication skills and the ability to work well independently or as part of a team.”
Good Example:
“Commercially focused HR Advisor with experience supporting employee relations, absence management, policy implementation, and manager coaching across multi site retail environments. Strong record of improving case handling consistency and supporting practical, legally sound people decisions.”
The good version is not longer for the sake of it. It gives the reader something to evaluate.
A key skills section can help, especially for ATS scanning and quick recruiter review. But it should not become a dumping ground.
Include skills that match the role and are genuinely supported by your experience. Do not list every skill you have ever touched.
For example, a finance candidate might include:
Management accounts
Budgeting and forecasting
Variance analysis
Month end reporting
Stakeholder management
Excel
Power BI
SAP
That is useful because it gives a quick relevance signal.
What does not help is a huge list of soft skills with no context. “Teamwork, communication, organisation, leadership, problem solving” appears on almost every CV. Without evidence, it is wallpaper.
This is usually the most important part of your CV.
For each role, include:
Job title
Employer name
Location if useful
Dates of employment
Brief context where needed
Responsibilities relevant to the target role
Achievements with evidence where possible
Recent roles deserve more space. Older roles should usually be shorter.
A common mistake is giving every job the same amount of detail. Your 2013 role does not need the same depth as your current role unless it is unusually relevant.
Recruiters care most about recent, relevant evidence. Your older experience can still support your profile, but it should not dominate the CV.
Education should be included, but the amount of space depends on your career stage.
If you are early career, education may sit higher on the CV and include modules, projects, dissertation topics, achievements, or relevant coursework.
If you are an experienced professional, education usually moves lower and becomes more concise.
Include:
Degree or qualification
Institution
Dates if useful
Professional certifications
Relevant training
Do not use half a page listing every short course from the last decade unless the training is genuinely relevant to the role.
For technical, digital, data, engineering, finance, marketing, HR, operations, and project roles, tools and systems can matter a lot.
Include systems clearly if they are relevant, such as:
Salesforce
HubSpot
Workday
SAP
Oracle
Power BI
Tableau
SQL
Python
Jira
This can support both ATS matching and recruiter screening.
But again, be honest. If you used a tool once in 2021 and can barely remember the login screen, do not position it as a core skill. That may get you into an interview, but it can also get awkward very quickly.
If your CV is too long, do not start by randomly shrinking the font. Start by cutting low value content.
The most common space wasters are:
Long personal statements
Generic soft skill claims
Repeated responsibilities across multiple roles
Old jobs with too much detail
Irrelevant early career experience
Outdated training
Hobbies with no relevance
References available on request
Full addresses
Too many bullets under each role
Dense paragraphs that could be shorter
Company descriptions that do not help the reader
The phrase “references available on request” can go. Employers already know this. No recruiter has ever stared at a CV and thought, “But will they provide references, or is this a lawless individual?” It is just taking up space.
You can also reduce length by combining repeated duties. If you have managed stakeholders in five roles, you do not need to say it in the same way five times. Show how the level, complexity, or outcome changed.
For example, instead of repeating:
Managed stakeholder relationships
Worked with internal teams
Produced reports
Supported process improvement
Across every role, make each role do a different job:
Current role: show leadership, outcomes, strategic scope, measurable impact
Previous role: show progression, technical development, or sector exposure
Older role: summarise only the relevant foundation experience
A CV should not read like copy and paste with different company names.
The right CV length depends heavily on career stage. A graduate and a senior operations director should not be using the same CV structure.
Usually one page is enough.
Focus on:
Education
Part time work
Volunteering
Projects
Achievements
Transferable skills
Reliability, communication, organisation, customer service, teamwork, and initiative with evidence
At this stage, employers are not expecting a long career history. They are looking for potential, attitude, basic capability, and signs that you can function in a work environment without creating chaos.
One page can work, but two pages may be acceptable if you have internships, placements, projects, volunteering, societies, part time work, or relevant technical skills.
Graduate CVs often fail because candidates fill space with abstract claims instead of useful evidence.
Instead of saying you are analytical, show the project, dataset, report, research, placement, or commercial problem where you used analysis.
One to two pages is usually right.
If you have one to three years of experience, your CV should start showing workplace evidence. You do not need to include every university module unless it is still relevant.
Your challenge is to show progression. Employers want to know whether you have moved beyond basic tasks and started building real capability.
Two pages is usually ideal.
This is where candidates often struggle because they have enough experience to fill five pages, but not all of it matters.
At this stage, your CV should show:
Clear role progression
Relevant achievements
Scope of responsibility
Industry knowledge
Systems or technical capability
Stakeholder exposure
Measurable outcomes
The main risk is becoming too descriptive. Do not just explain what your job was. Show what changed because you were there.
Two to three pages can be acceptable.
Senior CVs need to show scale. That may include:
Revenue responsibility
Team size
Budget ownership
Transformation work
Board exposure
Market expansion
Operational complexity
Strategic leadership
Mergers, restructures, growth, turnaround, or change programmes
But senior candidates also need restraint. A senior CV should not become a museum of every meeting, initiative, and committee.
Hiring managers want to understand leadership impact. They do not need a minute by minute record of your career.
Two to three pages may be appropriate, depending on the number and relevance of assignments.
Contractor CVs often need project detail because hiring managers want to know:
What project you delivered
What environment you worked in
What tools or methods you used
What your specific contribution was
Whether the assignment matches their current need
The trick is to avoid turning every contract into a full case study. Use concise project entries and prioritise the most relevant assignments.
Most applicant tracking systems do not reject a CV simply because it is two pages or three pages. That is not usually how ATS screening works.
ATS software is mainly used to store, parse, search, filter, and manage applications. Some employers use knockout questions or screening criteria, but the idea that every ATS automatically rejects CVs based on page count is one of those myths that refuses to retire gracefully.
What matters more is whether your CV is readable and well structured.
For ATS compatibility, your CV should:
Use clear headings such as Profile, Key Skills, Work Experience, Education, and Certifications
Avoid overly designed layouts that confuse parsing
Use standard job titles where possible
Include relevant keywords naturally
Avoid important information hidden in images, text boxes, icons, or graphics
Use consistent dates and formatting
Save the file in the requested format
Length can indirectly affect ATS performance if a long CV is full of irrelevant content and weak keyword focus. But the issue is not the page count itself. The issue is poor relevance.
A focused three page CV may parse better than a beautifully designed one page CV that hides half the useful information in columns and graphics.
Design should never make the recruiter work harder. Pretty but unreadable is still unreadable.
Hiring managers are usually less forgiving than recruiters when a CV is unfocused.
A recruiter may read between the lines because they are used to decoding CVs. A hiring manager often wants faster relevance. They are thinking about the role they need to fill, the team problem they have, and whether this candidate looks like a practical solution.
When a CV is too long, the hiring manager may assume:
The candidate cannot prioritise
The candidate does not understand the role
The candidate is including everything because they are unsure what matters
The strongest evidence may not actually be that strong
The candidate may be more senior, junior, or unfocused than expected
The application has not been tailored
Sometimes that assumption is unfair. But hiring is full of imperfect shortcuts. Candidates need to understand those shortcuts and work with reality, not the fantasy version of recruitment where everyone carefully reads every word with a cup of tea and a balanced emotional state.
They do not.
Your CV needs to make the right evidence obvious.
Use this practical test before deciding whether your CV should be one, two, or three pages.
Ask yourself:
Does page one clearly show why I am relevant?
Does every role include information that supports the job I want now?
Have I given more space to recent and relevant experience?
Have I removed repeated responsibilities?
Have I included evidence, not just tasks?
Could a recruiter understand my fit within 20 to 30 seconds?
Would a hiring manager see enough reason to interview me?
Is the final page strong, or is it just leftover content?
That last question is important.
A weak final page can damage the overall impression. If page three contains old jobs, hobbies, references, and training from 2009, it probably does not need to exist.
A strong final page may contain technical certifications, selected projects, publications, board roles, major consulting assignments, or additional relevant experience. That is different.
The page count should be the result of prioritisation, not accident.
Here is how I would think about CV length in real hiring situations.
A one page CV may be enough if the candidate has limited experience. But if they have internships, freelance work, content examples, campaign projects, analytics tools, and society leadership, two pages may be stronger.
The key is not to fill space with personality traits. Show evidence of campaign support, content creation, reporting, customer insight, social media scheduling, email marketing, or commercial awareness.
Two pages is usually appropriate. The CV needs to show more than customer service tasks. It should show coaching, escalation handling, KPI awareness, shift support, training, complaint resolution, and examples of improving team performance.
If the CV stays at “answered calls and responded to emails”, it will not position the candidate strongly for leadership.
Two pages is usually right, but three pages can work if the candidate has complex project experience.
The CV should show tech stack, project context, contribution, architecture exposure, collaboration, testing, deployment, and measurable outcomes where possible.
A skills list alone is not enough. Hiring managers want to know how the tools were used.
Two to three pages may be appropriate.
The CV should show reporting ownership, budgeting, forecasting, controls, leadership, systems, board reporting, commercial partnering, and measurable business impact.
At this level, vague phrases like “responsible for finance function” are not enough. What size function? What revenue? What team? What changed? What decisions did you influence?
Three pages may be acceptable if the assignments are relevant.
The CV should group older or less relevant contracts more tightly. The most recent and most relevant contracts need enough detail to show project fit.
Contractor CVs often succeed when they are easy to search, easy to scan, and clearly aligned with the assignment brief.
Most CV length problems are really judgement problems.
The candidate is either giving too little evidence, too much irrelevant history, or the wrong information in the wrong place.
Some candidates cut achievements first because achievements take more space than duties. That is backwards.
Achievements are often the most persuasive part of the CV. Cut generic duties before you cut evidence.
Your current and recent roles should usually carry the most detail. Older roles can be summarised.
If your oldest job has more detail than your most recent role, the CV may feel outdated or misaligned.
In the UK, you usually do not need to include:
Date of birth
Marital status
Nationality unless there is a specific right to work reason
Full home address
Photograph unless specifically relevant or requested, which is uncommon for standard UK CVs
This information takes space and can introduce unnecessary bias.
A CV is not an essay. Dense blocks of text slow the reader down.
Use concise paragraphs and bullet points where they improve scanning. Each bullet should carry useful information, not just describe an obvious task.
If your strongest experience is buried on page two, your CV structure is working against you.
Recruiters should not have to hunt for the reason you applied.
A longer CV does not make you look more experienced. It can make you look less decisive.
Seniority is shown through scope, complexity, judgement, outcomes, and leadership impact. Not through page count.
Use this framework when editing your CV.
Keep anything that directly supports your target role, especially:
Recent relevant experience
Achievements with measurable outcomes
Industry specific knowledge
Technical skills and tools
Leadership or stakeholder scope
Qualifications required or valued for the role
Projects that prove capability
Evidence of progression
Cut anything that weakens focus, including:
Repeated duties
Generic profile statements
Old irrelevant roles in too much detail
Outdated training
Personal information that is not needed
References available on request
Long hobby sections
Skills you cannot confidently discuss
Compress information that matters but does not deserve much space, such as:
Older roles
Early career experience
Similar contract assignments
Basic responsibilities
Less relevant qualifications
Company descriptions
Short term roles that are not central to your target
This is how you control CV length without damaging the strength of the CV.
You are not just cutting words. You are improving the signal.
For most UK professionals, a CV should be two pages. That gives enough space to show relevant experience, achievements, skills, and qualifications without overwhelming the reader.
Use one page if your experience is limited or early career. Use three pages only if your background genuinely requires more space and the extra content helps the hiring decision.
The real test is simple: does your CV make your fit easier to understand?
If the answer is yes, the length is probably fine.
If the answer is no, the problem is not the number of pages. The problem is focus.
A strong UK CV is not short for the sake of being short. It is selective. It respects the reader’s time. It gives the recruiter and hiring manager enough evidence to say, “This person is worth speaking to.”
That is the goal.
Not two pages because someone on the internet said so. Two pages because, for most candidates, it is the clearest way to show enough evidence without making the reader do unnecessary work.
Written by Simar Malhi, a recruiter and headhunter with international recruitment experience. I write about CVs, job applications, hiring decisions, and the reality behind recruitment processes. My goal is to help candidates understand more honestly how employers, recruiters, and hiring managers actually select candidates.
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