Getting a CV onto one page
Most people fit a CV to one page by deleting sentences until it fits, then find they have thrown away the sentence that would have got them the interview. There is a better order, and it is worth doing in that order every time: take the air out first, the type second, and the words last.
The order, and why it is that order
1. White space
The gaps between entries and around section headings are the cheapest thing on the page. Nobody has ever noticed that the space above a heading is 14pt rather than 20pt, and on a CV with eight roles that difference alone is worth most of a page.
One caveat, which we got wrong first: do not take space out uniformly. The gap between two sections carries meaning, because it is what tells the eye that a new section has started. Shrink that at the same rate as everything else and the page turns into one undifferentiated grey mass. We now compress the space around structure at roughly half the rate of everything else.
2. Leading
Line spacing next. Going from 1.45 to about 1.3 is invisible to a reader and buys a real amount of room. Below about 1.25 it starts to feel airless, and lines of long text become hard to track from the end of one to the start of the next.
3. Type size, a little
Body type can come down from 10pt to about 9.5 without anyone thinking about it. Our floor is 8.2pt, and it is a floor rather than a target. Below that a printed CV stops being comfortable, and anyone reading forty of them that afternoon will resent yours specifically.
Type is deliberately third rather than first. Shrinking type is the most visible compromise on the page and the one a reader feels first, so it should not be the thing you reach for while there is still air to remove.
4. The display type
If your CV opens with your name set large, that name is worth about two experience entries of vertical space. It should shrink faster than anything else on the page, because a 42pt name and a 30pt name look equally deliberate and one of them costs you a job you did in 2019.
There is a floor here too. Shrink the name far enough and the layout stops being the layout you chose. Ours stops at 30pt for exactly that reason.
5. Only now, the words
When the typography has given everything it can, start editing. Two rules make this survivable.
Cut the tail of a description, not the head. The first sentence carries the claim: what you were responsible for. The third is usually context that the interview will cover anyway. Trim from the bottom.
Never drop a role. A CV that lists every job in less detail is still a complete history. A CV missing three years is a question mark, and the reader will assume the worst about what happened in the gap. If something has to go, let it be the description on the oldest roles, leaving the title, the employer and the dates.
What does not work
- Shrinking the margins to nothing. A page with no margin looks cramped in a way readers register instantly, and some print setups clip it.
- Condensing the font. Narrow type at small sizes is genuinely harder to read, and on screen it looks like you were hiding something.
- Dropping the summary. It is the only part written to argue for you rather than describe you. Cut it to two sentences instead.
- Deleting your oldest job to save four lines. See above about gaps.
Should it even be one page?
For most people and most applications, yes: one page is read, two pages are skimmed and the second is often not opened at all. The honest exceptions are academic CVs, where publications are the point, and senior technical roles where a projects list is doing real work. If you are fifteen years in and genuinely cannot make the case in one page, two is fine, as long as the first page can stand alone.
The part worth automating
Doing this by hand means changing a value, exporting, looking, and going back, which is why most people give up and just delete sentences. It is mechanical enough to automate: render, measure, tighten by one step, measure again.
One thing to insist on if you do automate it. Whatever the tool takes away, it should tell you. A tool that quietly deletes the descriptions from four of your roles and hands you a tidy one-page PDF has edited your CV without asking. Ours says which of the steps above it had to use, in as many words, under the preview.
linkedinto.cv does exactly this ladder, in this order, and reports what it did. Try every layout in the browser, or read about what actually breaks ATS parsing and what LinkedIn's own export contains.