[gamble]

The problem with resume advice is that everyone who does interviews eventually develops their own set of strongly-held, essentially arbitrary beliefs about every aspect of the hiring process. It's all ultimately about finding reasons to toss resumes in the trash, until you get down to the handful of candidates that can be reasonably evaluated by one person.

[maxbrown]

I agree with you, particularly about interviewing - that the hirer will often have arbitrary beliefs and standards. But I'm not so sure about resumes. While inevitably there is some arbitrary nit-picking and subjective preferences, I would be willing to bet that there are a good few universals. For a business resume, I think no more than a page is one of them. I've edited many resumes and there's a number of guidelines for success that I make sure people follow.

Also, I bet if you were to take a large number of different recruiters for the same type of position and hand them a stack of resumes, they would mostly pick out the same few as stand-outs.

[dschobel]

Bingo. Also known as bikeshedding or more formally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality

[loumf]

The author made that point exactly at the end. I have found that extremely tailoring a resume and cover letter for the job works for me.