The short version
Yes. If you're an undergraduate applying to a bank or a consultancy, your CV is one page. Banks are strict about it. Some consulting firms will accept two, McKinsey among them, but I've never seen an undergraduate who had two pages of material a screener cared about. A second page padded to fill it tells them you can't prioritise, and prioritising is half the job.
If yours runs over, the answer is cutting. Shrinking the font or the margins until it fits makes a CV harder to read in eight seconds, which defeats the point.
Why one page
The average screener spends about eight seconds on a CV before deciding. They're looking for a handful of things: your university and grades, the names of the firms you've worked at, your titles, and a few numbers. One page in a standard layout puts all of that where they expect it. Two pages means they have to look for it, and most won't.
What to cut first
Go through in this order. Most CVs are back on one page before you reach the end.
- The profile or summary at the top. For an undergraduate it's almost always generic, and it takes your best three lines.
- "References available on request." They know.
- Microsoft Office. Everyone writes it, few people are good at it, and screeners know that. Keep Excel only if you can actually build a model.
- A long list of modules. For banking, keep two or three that matter, like Corporate Finance or Accounting. For consulting, you can usually drop the line.
- Old school detail. One line for your school with your final grades is enough. GCSEs only if they were exceptional.
- Repeated skills. If three experiences each have a bullet about building an Excel model, keep the best one. Each bullet should show something new.
- Weak entries. Cut a whole weak experience before you cut a line from a strong one.
Don't shrink it to fit
Keep the font at 10.5pt or above and the margins at about 1.5 to 2cm. Below that, a page looks like content that didn't fit, and a cramped page doesn't get read. If you're squeezing, cut another line.
The most common problem isn't two pages
It's one or two lines spilling onto page 2. It looks worse than either a clean page or a full second one, and it's nearly always fixed by tightening two bullets.
The opposite problem happens too: the content is right, but there's a gap at the bottom of the page. Don't fill it with padding. Add real detail to your strongest bullets, or widen the top and bottom margins a little to draw the page down.
Watch for words hanging onto a new line
A bullet that spills two or three words onto a second line wastes almost a whole line. Either cut it so it fits on one line, or add something real so it fills two. On most CVs I review, fixing these frees up two or three lines, which is a whole extra bullet.
Make sure a machine can read it
Before a person sees your CV, an applicant tracking system reads it. These break that step even when they look fine on screen:
- Tables and two-column layouts
- Text boxes and sidebars
- Contact details in the header or footer, which the system often drops
- Icons, logos, photos and skill-rating bars
One column, plain text and standard bullets.
The review checks your page count and layout, and tells you which bullets to cut first.