The most commonly asked question about resumes is this one, according to Monster.com:

How long should my resume be?

As Goldilocks found in the home of the three bears, the right item will be “just right,” and pardon the ambiguity, but the same holds true for resumes. We’ll get to a handy rule of thumb below, but first, some guidelines as you consider length.

The top counts

In its advice about personal finance and money, Time.com says recruiters spend just 3 seconds scanning the top of your resume before deciding whether to keep reading. So make the top third of the page count. Sounds like pressure, but if you edit for relevancy, you will be on the right track.

Being relevant

In fact, career sites advise you these days to focus on pertinent accomplishments before you worry about length. For example, in this piece from U.S. News & World Report, the author advises resume writers to strip the document of details that aren’t directly related to the target job. Stay concise.

“Don’t get bogged down in minutiae,” says Jennifer Shryock, president of Rainmaker.

The resume’s job is to get you in the door for an interview, she says. So keep the material crisply focused on the details the recruiter wants to see.

The piece above is from 2014, but it has advice that’s still good today. For example, just because you can’t fit a tidbit into your resume doesn’t mean you can’t broadcast it, according to the author: Include it in your LinkedIn page. (Need help with LinkedIn? Rainmaker writes those, too.)

One word of caution, though: Think twice before removing your community involvement from your resume, as the writer suggests. The author recommends you keep it only if it’s directly related to the job at hand, but a talent acquisition vice president recently offered Rainmaker some different advice here.

Length, at last

Here are some guidelines for getting your resume “just right.”

In the workplace a decade or more? Feel free to write a couple of pages since you’ve racked up some accomplishments, if they’re relevant to your target position.

If you’re a senior executive or an academician, you shouldn’t feel constrained to two pages. Three is fine.

But question going beyond three pages. Rainmaker head Jennifer Shryock has read and written many, many resumes, and she said she’s rarely seen a four-pager that shouldn’t have been three pages instead. In fact, Rainmaker has crafted resumes for global executives that are a tight three pages because three is “just right.”

As always, if you need help finding the sweet spot, Rainmaker Resumes stands ready to help.