[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.