As a recruiter, almost nothing bothers me more than an overly clever or creatively formatted resume. It's not that I don't appreciate the work and thoughtfulness put into it, it's that it's a pain-in-the-ass to store it in a way that makes it easy to find. (And when you get more than 100 resumes a day, resumes have to be easy to find via keyword searches.)
Yes, yes, yes, I know, someone told you (or you've read) that you need to make your resume stand out. Maybe they've suggested using a fancy template or fancy graphics, making an audio or video CV, using Adobe or the Microsoft resume template...and so on. Well unless you're a creative (professionally speaking- meaning that you earn your living by being a creative in creative industry) they've given you bad advice. After all, the first thing I do when I download a resume is give it a quick read and then upload it into a tool that "grabs" the pertinent content and stores it.
If your resume is not in MS Word or html, the grabber might miss tagging the very piece of information that would lead me to you when I do a search for your skill set. If you're an exceptional candidate this is very sad; we all lose.
