The rule of thumb is that your resume should only go back about 10 to 15 years. This advice gained popularity in the 1980s and remains the standard today. The only exceptions are if you’re an executive leader, have experience at an eye-catching company from more than 10 years ago, spent 10+ years with the same company, or it’s the only way for you to meet the necessary qualifications.
Recruiters use your resume to predict your future performance based on your past work. As the old expression goes, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”
The most reliable information they have is what you accomplished at your most recent stops.
“Hiring managers don’t care about what you did 22 years ago, or what you did 17 years ago, or even what you did ten years ago,” Kristin Fife, a technical recruiter with 22 years of experience, told me. “They want to know what you’ve been doing the last 5–7 years, or even 3–5.”
That’s one reason recruiters prefer the reverse-chronological resume format. It helps them see how you work in the active business environment. The farther back they read, the less relevant your experience is to the business problems they’re hiring to solve. Lead them back too far and your experience might do more harm than good.
How far is too far, exactly? Are there instances when breaking the “rules” is your best shot?
Great questions. This guide has the answers.
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Determining How Far Back Your Resume Should Go
The job listing you’re targeting can help determine how much work history to keep on your resume. Every job opening has different asks, so you should know how to tailor a resume.
Here are some indicators in the job description that hint at how far back hiring teams expect your resume to go:
How many jobs to include on your resume by career stage
The job you’re applying to falls into a seniority level or career stage. While the exact definition of each level varies by company, industry, and even individual, this can still help you make informed guesses about how much resume experience you’ll need to land an interview.
- Junior or Entry-Level doesn’t usually mean “no experience.” You need to find 1–3 years of experience to put on your resume. If you have zero relevant experience, your education can help make up for your empty work history.
- Mid-Level resumes should have at least five years of experience to establish your career path. At this level, recruiters want proof that you can apply the skills from the job description in a professional environment. Your resume should show how and where you developed the key skills from the job description.
- Senior-Level jobs are less about years of experience and more about expertise in key areas. Your resume needs to prove your earned knowledge and expert skills related to the specific opening. Use a resume keyword scanner to catch any keywords missed.
- Director or Executive-level jobs create a big impact on the organization. Recruiters need more information. Your resume should cover your entire career. For most positions older than 15 years, you can just list job titles and companies without additional bullet points.
Junior or Entry-Level
Entry level does not mean “no experience.” It typically means the lowest level someone can start a career path within an organization. Most entry level jobs require some relevant experience on your resume.
For example, I see an entry-level Sheet Metal Fabricator job that still requires “1 year or more experience with warehousing and related functions” at a minimum but prefers “3 or more years of experience.” Similarly, I see an entry-level Communications Coordinator job that requires “1–2 years experience,” preferably in an agency setting.
For an entry-level role, your resume must include enough recent and relevant experience to cover the minimum requirements and show that you’re taking progressive steps down a career path.
“If they're looking for 1–2 years of actual work experience, that means they need someone who has seen at least a few outlier incidents that aren't textbook perfect that can make some decision calls without as much mentoring,” says Fife.
What if I have no relevant experience?
To take that first step, you must rely on any odd (non-career) jobs you’ve held in retail, hospitality, food service, general labor, gig work, etc. Any job is better than no job in this case. You can still build trust with the hiring team by showing that you have real experience in a professional setting. Be sure to highlight any experience working directly with customers, clients, or cash-handling.
Recent grads can use internships and school projects to bolster their lack of experience.
“If [your resume] is all academic, you need to focus on the projects,” says Fife. “Focus on the things that have some kind of measurable result.”
Fife suggests adding school projects on a resume in which you collaborated with clients or local businesses to your resume.
“If you have an internship or two behind you, the internships obviously go first,” she adds. “After that, you want to put specific projects.”
Mid-Level
Mid-level is where your career starts taking shape and you have a track record to look back on. The mid-level stage includes individual contributor and early management roles and may require anywhere from 3 to 10 years of experience, depending on the hiring company.
Fife suggests shooting for 5–7 years of experience on your mid-level resume. That would just clear the bar for an active mid-level UX Designer opening I see that requires a “minimum five years of professional or related design experience within an agency, in-house design team, or freelancing.”
“You don’t want it to go on-and-on forever,” Fife says, but context is key. At this level, you can instill confidence in recruiters by going back far enough to show when and where you acquired and developed the skills and qualifications required for this particular job.
You may also drop odd jobs and general work experience unrelated to your current field at this point.
Senior-Level
For a senior-level job posting, it’s not about the total years of experience but what you’ve done with that time. Highlight specific functions, industries, technologies, and business environments you’ve mastered.
While having 10 or more years of experience helps, what’s even more critical is showing deep expertise in relevant areas. Granted, it’s highly unlikely that you can meet the senior-level qualifications without going back at least 7–10 years on your resume.
Example time.
Take a look at this Senior Machine Learning Engineer opening at Adobe that pays up to $284,000 per year. It only has one year-based requirement: “4+ years of hands-on experience with PyTorch and Python in a production environment.” But check out the rest of the bullet points.
You can’t develop strong, validated expertise or a deep understanding of anything that the job description requires without putting in the time. Recruiters need to see that you have enough hands-on experience to be a real expert in the role.
“It’s not just the [minimum] requirements,” says Fife. “Read the full job description. You want your skillset to match the minimum qualifications, but you want your experience to show that you can do the job that’s in the responsibilities section.”
Work backwards through your resume. Starting with the most recent, make sure your job description mentions anything you did related to minimum and preferred qualifications. For a senior-level role, you’ll likely go back 7–15 years to establish the level of expertise required to be a top applicant.
“If you want to show how well you match the job description, pull those key skills out of the job description,” says Fife.
Once your jobs stop addressing the senior-level qualifications, stop adding them.
Director and Executive
Executive and upper management job listings may ask for anywhere between 5–20 years of specific experience. Regardless, you likely have to utilize your whole career to stand out as the best executive candidate.
“If it’s an executive resume, if you’re looking at Senior VP or C-Suite, you go all the way back,” says Fife. “That’s just standard. Your resume is probably going to be more than two pages.”
Upper management and executive roles hold immense power over other people in the organization. Sharing more of your career journey on your resume helps establish trust and credibility.
That doesn’t mean your resume has to be a comprehensive list of everything you were ever responsible for. It means you should connect jobs from up and down your career to the open executive position.
An executive job is likely to ask for things like:
- A deep working knowledge of the hiring company’s industry or business landscape
- Executive or upper management experience at a similarly sized company
- Progressive management experience and increasing responsibility
- Demonstrated leadership, organizational growth
- Examples of strategic vision with results
- A history of dealing with the obstacles currently facing the company
- The ability to step in and get specific tasks done that are holding up the organization
It’s unlikely that you’ll cover everything from the job description with your most recent executive roles. Address the specific items from the job listing in every job you can. As you go 10, 15, 20 years back on your resume, your descriptions can get shorter, or you can skip them altogether — just list the company, dates worked, and your job title.
Recommended resources:
Additional Reasons to Keep Older Jobs On Your Resume
Clout and name recognition
Recruiters and hiring managers like seeing recognizable companies anywhere on the resume. If you’ve worked for Big Tech like MAMAA (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet), a reputable Blue Chip (e.g. Coca-Cola, IBM, DuPont, American Express, McDonald’s), or other culturally notable companies deep in your past, it could help to include them.
In the startup world, showing that you were an early employee at a future unicorn or well-established company holds immense value.
Noteworthy achievements
If there is something deep in your career that you’ll want to mention in a job interview, your resume should go back far enough to include it. This could include major awards, press coverage for your work, or huge business wins.
OFCCP compliance
If you see mention of OFCCP compliance, understand that the company “can only consider applicants that 100% meet the basic qualifications as stated in the job description,” says Fife. In this case, go back as many years as you need on your resume to meet every single basic qualification. It’s the only way through.
You’ve worked for the same company for 10+ years
Recruiters and hiring managers love to see your commitment to an employer — there is an unfair bias against perceived “job hoppers” — but they also like a diversity of experience. No two companies are the same. If you’ve been with the same company for many years, consider adding older experience to show that you’ve succeeded in a variety of work environments.
You’re taking a step back
If your career has taken you in an unexpected direction and you want to go back to a role you used to do (e.g., management back to individual contributor), your resume experience should go back farther than normal to demonstrate your abilities. Anything in your resume summary section should be backed up with experience. “If I can’t figure out what skill you’re referring to in your resume [summary], I’m not going to give you a call,” says Fife.
Reasons to Leave Older Jobs Off Your Resume
Age discrimination
“I don’t care what anyone says, it’s a real thing,” says Fife. If you think you’re competing with a younger demographic, sacrificing early experience could help get your foot in the door.
Outmoded skills
If one of your old jobs was based on a software, technology, or piece of equipment that is no longer in use, leaving it off of your resume could help you seem more current and up to date. If you’re going to keep the experience, be sure to demonstrate how and when you evolved. For example, an experienced graphic designer’s resume might mention their transitions from Quark to Adobe Creative Suite to a cloud-based platform like Figma.
Google Search Trends showing declining interest in Quark (aka QuarkXPress) and increasing interest in InDesign (Adobe) since 2004, plus recent interest in Figma (cloud).
Disreputable companies
It doesn’t have to be on the level of Enron or FTX, but if your former employer has been caught up in fraud or any well-known scandals, try leaving them out of your resume and working around them even if you avoided wrongdoing or were “just doing your job.”
Experiences you don’t want to talk about
Sometimes we make a mistake with the jobs we accept. If you took a job that you left or got fired from within a few months, removing these positions from your resume will save you talking around them in your interview.
Ready to interview? Gain confidence by practicing with Rezi AI Interview.
Summary
There is no set rule for how many years to go back on your resume. It requires a little bit of thinking to know which of your older jobs are worth showcasing and which ones can be left out. Or, as Fife says, “It’s not your length, it’s not how far back you go, it’s how you put your resume together that’s important.”
Your resume has one job, and one job only: to convince the hiring decision makers you’ve got everything it takes to succeed in the role they’re hiring for. No matter how far back you go on your resume, each item in the resume work experience section should prove just that.
Remember:
- If you’re just starting out, any job is better than no job because it shows you can handle yourself in a professional environment.
- Once established in your career, your resume experience should show your deepening expertise in your chosen field. Skills build upon skills.
- As an executive leader, flex your extensive industry knowledge and success leading teams and organizations to meet business goals.
Rezi has a slate of tools to help focus your resume on what’s important. Try the resume keyword scanner to catch anything you’ve missed, resume summary generator to put your career into perspective, or the AI resume writer to walk you through the whole process.
FAQ
Do I have to list every job I’ve had in the past?
No. Your resume is not required to be a comprehensive work history. You can leave out any jobs that you’d like as long as you’re prepared to deal with the gaps.
There are many reasons to leave jobs off of your resume outside of the years-based guidelines above.
You no longer need to include unrelated odd jobs from when you first joined the workforce once you’re a couple of years into your career. You do not need to include short-term jobs that you quit early or were fired from if they’ll be uncomfortable to discuss in an interview. You shouldn’t include jobs at companies with values that contradict the values of your target company (particularly in sensitive industries like public policy or religion).
How far back do I go on my resume if I’ve changed careers?
Switching careers typically involves sacrificing experience and taking a step back in order to reach new career goals. That means your resume should follow the job-level guidelines above and stop once your experience is no longer relevant.
Going back too far into your old career will only lead recruiters to ask themselves, “Why did they even apply for this job?”
The most relevant content on your career change resume might include any new degrees (going back to school), new certifications (like from a reputable coding bootcamp), and transferable skills.
Fife says the concept of transferable skills is misunderstood by job seekers: “Transferable skills are hard, functional skills, not attributes.”
Fife uses people management as an example. “That’s a general skill that can translate across any industry with the understanding that you can’t just go from being a people manager at, say, a Walmart, to being a people manager at a tech company. You can’t just make that leap without industry experience. There’s context.”
Having context is transferable in itself. For example, it’s not uncommon for a Project Manager who works directly with software engineers and designers to earn certifications and switch sides, or vice versa. Experience in or near your new work environment isn’t as valuable as direct experience, but it will help you stand out among other entry-level candidates.
How many pages should my resume be?
There are no hard rules for how many pages your resume should be. Generally, entry-level resumes can be limited to one page. Mid-to-senior resumes may stretch to two pages to demonstrate the needed experience. Executive-level resumes can reach three or more pages.
I’m a new grad with little relevant experience in my field. Do I put the education section above work history on a resume?
Your education should be the first thing on your resume until you have at least a couple of years of relevant experience. Learn more about the resume education section.
How far back should my “Certifications” section go on a resume?
Include any certifications you have that are required in the job description. Some industries rely more on certifications than others, like accounting, human resources, or electrical engineering.
Elective certifications are great for demonstrating base-level knowledge and for learning new skills. They are not as valuable as practical work experience. If you earned a certification to learn a new skill, you can remove it once you’ve earned a year or two of work experience in that area.
Most certifications have an expiration date. You can safely leave expired certifications off of your resume. Renew any expired certifications that are required in the job description.
Do I need to explain or address old employment gaps on my resume?
You should attempt to explain employment gaps in a competitive job market like this one.
If you had a period of unemployment due to a layoff, an employment gap is understandable and can be explained with the simple addition of the reduction-in-force acronym “(RIF)” next to the company name. Layoffs are common and good hiring teams won’t fault you for it.
If you took a break from work to raise a family or be a caregiver, it’s beneficial to include a line between work experiences briefly explaining the situation.
You can also fill in employment gaps by demonstrating how you developed new skills with a side project, certifications, or freelancing.
