Take what your school tells you about job searching and interviewing with a grain of salt. Many college career centers offering job searching advice are out-of-touch at best and dangerously incompetent at worst. Anything they say that strikes you as odd or bizarre probably is exactly that. Workplace-related blogs and sites like this one are generally more reliable sources of information but you always want to be careful about whose advice you accept.
As for resumes, the golden rule is:
- never have more than two pages
- stick to one page if you only have a few years of work experience
The reason for this is that you want your resume to be a real marketing document that showcases your strengths. That means that every phrase on it should highlight your skills or experience in some way. Anything that doesn't do that is pure filler and will negatively impact the reader's opinion. Hiring manager are busy people and don't appreciate you saying everything twice or mentioning things that don't make you a better candidate. They want to quickly be able to see the experience you have and whether that makes you a fit for their company and the position they're hiring for.
It's simply the reality that with only a few years worth of experience, you won't have enough accomplishments or developed skills to fill two pages without resorting to filler or abusive amounts of white space.
As Alison Green says:
Two-page resumes are common now, so if you’re been agonizing over how to stick to one page, agonize no longer. There is one big exception to this, though, and that’s if you only have a few years of experience. If that’s you, stick to one page. It looks a little silly to see someone two years out of school with a two-page resume; it’s rarely needed, and you’ll generally come across as a little self-important or unable to edit. There are exceptions to every rule, of course — but in my experience, everyone thinks they’re the exception on this, when only a small minority of people really are. So be brutal about sticking to one if your experience is limited.
She also goes on to mention how you probably never want to break the two-page barrier:
I also see a lot of three-page resumes, but I’ve yet to be convinced that anyone is in a situation where they need a third page. (Obviously, if you’re under 30, don’t even think about this. Hell, if you’re under 40, don’t even think about this.) I’m not going to reject someone because they use three pages, but I’m also not sure I’ve ever seen anyone I wanted to hire who used a third page. I suspect there’s a correlation between hireability and the ability to concisely distill your accomplishments down to what matters.
Richard rightly pointed out that in some industries and highly technical fields, longer resumes can be the norm. These are typically fields with a high number of possible qualifications and areas of specialization where you also want to back up your qualifications with your work experience. Job searchers in this position will typically know that this is standard for their field though. As an example, I've seen this be recommended for SAP experts and can confirm that two pages could be difficult for an experienced candidate in that field.
I worked quite a bit while in school so I have a long and varied resume and with teams/clubs I'm part of I can easily fill 2 pages.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Teams and clubs probably don't belong on your resume in the first place, unless you truly accomplished things there that required real effort and taught you skills that will transfer to the type of work you're interviewing for.
