I found a great article by Zack Grossbart which details his adventures in assembling a resume. Besides selecting which content to provide, he goes into depth about formatting of a resume.
While I personally believe he is on the right track that format is as important as content when it comes to a resume, as we all know when dealing with recruiters they insist on a "word formatted document" so they can fit it to their personal style. This has frustrated me for years, I have tried providing cut/paste locked PDF, faxes, etc and this has never really worked. I had several people re-type my resume for me so that they could put it in their format.
Of all the times my resume was reformatted "for me", only one reformatting ever appealed to me in terms of an improvement (IMHO). Remember there are two goals of your resume a) getting you an interview & b) as a reference document during the interview for notes and prompting questions.
One technique I've used to navigate the job-hunt process is to bring the resume I want to the interview and provide it to the person who your talking to. If your asked why your presenting a different resume the answer is simple and very honest. Typically I'll say "well you know how recruiting firms are, I want to make sure what your reading is what I wanted you to read not someone else's version of my experience"
In case you've never interviewed someone else let me describe a typical session from the other side of the desk. In some cases you know about the interview in advance, but more often 10 min before someone comes into your office and says "you have 20 min to interview someone for me". Even if you had the resume in your hand before the person is seated in-front of you, it's unlikely you've decided on the questions you want to ask.
Ever sit in-front of someone, they introduce themselves and then say "give me a minute to review your resume". This is the magic moment where they will highlight / circle / underline the things they will spend the next 15 minutes talking to you about. It's not about content now, its about formatting. The harder it is for them to scan over and identify the high points the less they are going to talk about specifics and it will become a general "what do you think you can do for us" style of interview. That or the dreaded 20 questions, that might lead down the wrong road and create the wrong impression.
The resume that is in the hand's of the interviewer at the time of the interview will be your last "first-impression". Therefore, format is as important as content at this moment. Also showing to an interview without your own copies of your resume is a poor impression, and also consumes valuable time while the interviewer tracks down a copy.
Hopefully, you'll walk in and the interviewer will dive right into a conversational style interview (I find these are the most successful), but if it becomes 20 questions think about it, do you want to have any control over the topics of the questions or not.
Next time your on a bus, subway, train lean over and glance at the newspaper, book, etc that the person is reading (I'm not suggesting reading confidential documents). Pay attention to which style of print you can read from a distance, which fonts can be scanned more easily while moving in front of you, etc. Formatting is to thank for the easy or difficultly in which you can glance at something from a distance.
Oh and the corollary to this, print all email's, confidential information, etc in that wonderful Arial font, or even better Arial Narrow. Print it out, set it on your desk and try and casually glace at the document to get some information. Not easy is it..
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