The short answer: one page under five years of experience, two pages beyond that, three almost never.
The longer answer is that page count is a proxy for something else, and arguing about the proxy is how candidates spend an evening deleting a job from 2014 that was never the problem.
Where the one-page rule comes from
It comes from the American resume, a different document with different conventions, designed for a market where recruiters screen very high volumes and where the document deliberately omits detail.
The European CV, and the Belgian one in particular, is expected to carry more: full employment dates, education, languages, and for technical profiles a genuine list of technologies. Compressing all of that onto one page produces a document in six-point type that nobody can read.
So the rule is not wrong, it is imported. Apply it where it fits.
When one page is the right call
One page works when you have fewer than about five years of experience, when you are applying for your first or second role, or when you are changing career and most of your history is not relevant to the reader.
It also works for freelance and interim profiles applying to a short, well-defined mission, where the client wants to see fit with this assignment rather than a full career history.
If you are early in your career, a single dense page reads as focus. A padded second page reads as padding.
When two pages is the right call
Two pages is standard from roughly five to ten years of experience onwards, and expected beyond that.
Senior and technical profiles need the room. A developer with four relevant stacks, an engineer with project references, a consultant with a portfolio of assignments: forcing those onto one page removes exactly the evidence the hiring manager is looking for.
In Belgium, a two-page CV is not held against you. A two-page CV where page two is a list of soft skills is.
What never justifies a third page
Almost nothing, in the private sector.
The exceptions are genuine: academic CVs with publications, and some highly regulated or public-sector applications that ask for an exhaustive format. Outside those, a third page usually contains the same three things: jobs older than fifteen years described in full, a skills matrix with self-assessed star ratings, and personal interests.
Cut all three. Roles older than fifteen years belong in a two-line summary at the end.
Page count is not really the question
Recruiters do not reject a CV for being two pages. They reject it for taking two pages to say one page of things.
The real test is density: can someone scanning your CV for thirty seconds find what you do, what you have delivered, and whether you fit the role? If yes, the length is fine. If no, cutting a page will not save it.
A useful exercise: delete every line that does not say what changed because you were there. Whatever is left is your real CV, and its natural length is the answer.
How applicant tracking systems change the question
Most applications in Belgium now pass through a system before a human sees them, and those systems do not count pages.
What they do care about is structure: standard section headings, real text rather than text inside an image, a simple single-column layout, and dates in a consistent format. A beautifully designed one-page CV in two columns can parse worse than a plain two-page one.
This is a separate problem and we covered it here: how to write a CV that passes both humans and AI filters. The layout mistakes that break parsing are also in top CV mistakes that could cost you your next job.
What recruiters actually read first
In order: your current or most recent job title, your current employer, the dates, and then the first three bullet points underneath.
Everything else is confirmation. This is why the top third of page one is worth more than the whole of page two, and why moving your strongest achievement up is a bigger win than any amount of trimming at the bottom.
In short
Under five years, one page. Over five years, two. Three only for academic or public-sector formats that explicitly ask for it.
Then stop optimising the page count and optimise the top third of page one, because that is the part that decides whether page two ever gets opened.
If you want a second opinion on where your CV actually loses the reader, our consultants review profiles before submitting them to clients. Start by browsing the open roles.
