Over 50 percent of recruiters spend two minutes or less reviewing resumes. The judgment on whether or not to hire you, however, is typically made within five seconds. A number of steps can help you position your resume for high impact.
Resume Style
Chronological Resume: By starting with your work history, with the most recent position listed first, employers can easily see any gaps in your employment, and when and where your skills and experience were applied. The chronological resume works well for those with at least several years of work experience in related fields. While following you career path, the recruiter will be able to see how you progressively advanced in experience, training and responsibility.

Functional Resume: If you are changing careers, a new job entrant or have gaps in your employment history, a functional resume will place the focus on your skills and experience. The functional format provides flexibility to creatively repackage your skills for the desired position. A business consultant, for example, may tailor his resume around the redesign of financial processes, functions and departments, as part of larger projects, for a position in a finance department.

Combination Resume: Increasingly, job seekers are taking the best of both approaches by listing skills and experience first to highlight relevant skills for the job applied for, followed by employment history. An Oracle systems analyst may demonstrate his high level of knowledge and skills in enterprise-wide systems in the opening bullet points and then support his expertise with a chronology of well-rounded experience and training in systems integration.

Targeted Resume: Customizing your resume to specifically highlight experience and skills relevant to the job will get you noticed. Making the perfect skills and experience match is extra work but well worth the effort. If you are a human resources manager applying for a job as a facilitator, detailed experience and training in group dynamics and consensus building may take priority over staff recruitment and retention skills.

Keywords
At some point, your resume is going to make it into a database and be retrieved (or not!) by someone running a query on keywords. Resume data is routinely collected from resumes posted to job boards. Your paper resume also may be scanned by a recruiter or prospective employer. To ensure you are captured in a database search, use professional terms to describe positions, skills and experience. Be sure to fill your resume with professional job titles and functions — “software development manager,” for example, not “manager of programmers.”
Format
If you are webpage designer, your resume is an opportunity to display your skills. Show off but do not deviate from the standard information presentation format. If the telephone number is not at the top of the page following the address, your resume may be put aside and forgotten. The recruiter’s eyes should flow from strength to strength. Avoid fancy fonts and formatting, such as columns and tabs.

Update your resume regularly
Update your resume on a regular basis with relevant courses, training programs and other academic qualifications that you might receive along the way. Be mindful of industry trends, current training programs and professional designations. Your resume should communicate to the prospective employer that you are on top of industry developments.

Positioning a resume for high impact takes more effort. Keep in mind that those who make the effort to tailor their qualifications to meet the specific criteria of the job posting have a higher response rate than the cut-and-pasters.