How Long Should a Senior Game Industry Resume Be?

Two pages. Three at the outside, and only if the first half page makes the argument.

But length isn't the real problem with most senior game industry resumes. They're a record of where you've been. Nobody's reading to verify your history. They're asking one question: what is this person for?

Your resume isn't too long. It's answering the wrong question. You wrote a career history when you needed an argument.

How does a senior resume actually get read?

Scanned first. Not read.

The reader is looking for a shape. Something that lets them say, out loud, in a meeting, "this is the person who did X." If they can't find that shape in under a minute, the resume goes in the pile. Not rejected. Just set down. Politely forgotten.

More pages don't make the shape clearer. They bury it.

What goes at the top of a director-level resume?

A positioning statement. Not a summary. Three parts, in this order.

Marquee results, with numbers. The two or three wins that define your career. Real figures, not adjectives.

A named method. The how. The repeatable way you get those results. Give it a name. A named method is easy to remember and easy to repeat in a room you're not in.

What people come to you for. The thing colleagues and leaders keep bringing you back in for. It's the line a reader will use to describe you.

All three go at the top of page one. The job history underneath becomes evidence, not the main event.

What does a positioning statement look like?

A senior executive I coach came in with 20-plus years of story to tell and the question most senior people ask: how do I create a resume that isn't a novel?

We didn't start by cutting. We started by deciding what the resume was arguing. Then we built the top of it around those three parts, and everything below became support.

Here's the shape, with an illustrative example. (Made-up numbers, not a client result.)

Marquee results: Shipped four titles on schedule across three platforms. Cut cost overruns by 30% in two years. Grew a studio from 40 to 120 without missing a milestone.

The method: The Locked Scope Method. A repeatable way to define what ships, freeze it early, and protect it.

What people come to them for: Getting troubled projects over the line.

Notice where it sits. Headline, short summary, marquee results. The job history doesn't start until all of that is done.

What should you cut from a senior resume?

Anything older than fifteen years shrinks to a line or two. No bullets. Your 2003 job is context, not evidence.

Responsibilities go. Outcomes stay. "Managed a team of twelve" describes a job. "Rebuilt a twelve-person team through a studio merger with no attrition" describes you. (Example wording. Swap in real ones.) If a bullet would be true for anyone who held that title, cut it.

Kill the skills wall. Nobody reads it, and at your level it reads insecure. The work should prove the skills.

Replace the generic summary. "Experienced leader with a proven track record" is furniture. The positioning statement does that job with numbers.

What should each bullet say?

What changed, and how much.

Numbers aren't always available. When they're not, the change still is. Something was different because you were there. Name that.

What if you've done more than one thing well?

Cutting is the easy half. Deciding what you're arguing is the hard half.

If you've done multiple things well across 20 years, you probably don't have one clean story. You have three. The instinct is to include all three, because each one is real and you earned it.

That instinct is what makes the resume run long.

You don't have to abandon the other two. Pick the one that's loudest for this role. The rest is context. It's still you. It's just not the headline.