Unless you can speak to the person in advance, or find out via a third party, you can't know.
There is variation, so it's a numbers game - you have to send out without knowing if you're doing the right thing in each case.
I've spoken with recruiters about this, and like hiring managers, some of them favour a short resume that says very little ("less is more"), others favour a detailed one ("your experience will impress").
However there is a consistent aspect. They pretty much all need:
- Something that fits what HR is looking for in a few seconds skimming early in the first page. Bear in mind HR rarely understands any of things they are looking for, and are easily led astray if they think you are in category X when they are looking for Y, even if you can do X and Y equally.
- Something that fits what the hiring manager is looking for in a few seconds skimming early in the first page, and doesn't look onerous to read through.
- Something that passes keyword matches.
- Depending on the company, or how you get in, something that passes an ATS's assessment of experience (not just keywords but duration working, level of things like did you do management), and doesn't get tripped up by things like column formatting.
One of the things to remember is that almost nobody will read the entire resume or CV, unless it matches what low-effort pattern matching they are doing in a quick initial skim.
There's also quite a lot of variation in whether they are looking for "exact matches" to named skills ("although you have listed CSS, Webpack, ES6, Typescript, HTML5... we're can't proceed because we're looking for someone who knows JavaScript"), or quite fuzzy ("we know any good developer can learn a new language fairly quickly, what we're looking for is evidence that you know software").
Again, you just have to guess and play a numbers game, because they rarely say what they are looking for, and they are looking for different things.
Yes, this is also my conclusion. To a great extent, it's a lottery. As a contractor (in the UK), I look for new roles every year or two on average, so I end up applying for quite a few. Most of these roles involve agencies, so the CV has to meet the arbitrary requirements of both the agency, and the end client - and these are often quite different.
There is variation, so it's a numbers game - you have to send out without knowing if you're doing the right thing in each case.
I've spoken with recruiters about this, and like hiring managers, some of them favour a short resume that says very little ("less is more"), others favour a detailed one ("your experience will impress").
However there is a consistent aspect. They pretty much all need:
- Something that fits what HR is looking for in a few seconds skimming early in the first page. Bear in mind HR rarely understands any of things they are looking for, and are easily led astray if they think you are in category X when they are looking for Y, even if you can do X and Y equally.
- Something that fits what the hiring manager is looking for in a few seconds skimming early in the first page, and doesn't look onerous to read through.
- Something that passes keyword matches.
- Depending on the company, or how you get in, something that passes an ATS's assessment of experience (not just keywords but duration working, level of things like did you do management), and doesn't get tripped up by things like column formatting.
One of the things to remember is that almost nobody will read the entire resume or CV, unless it matches what low-effort pattern matching they are doing in a quick initial skim.
There's also quite a lot of variation in whether they are looking for "exact matches" to named skills ("although you have listed CSS, Webpack, ES6, Typescript, HTML5... we're can't proceed because we're looking for someone who knows JavaScript"), or quite fuzzy ("we know any good developer can learn a new language fairly quickly, what we're looking for is evidence that you know software").
Again, you just have to guess and play a numbers game, because they rarely say what they are looking for, and they are looking for different things.