Creating a successful resume.

This is not the stuff they put in books, so it requires a light touch...

First never ever ever lie on a resume, it is just stupid!
The key in my mind is highlighting you positives and minimizing the negatives in the readers mind. Yes I know duh! But what I mean is that the designer of the resume must laid out the document in such a way that good things are first, and presented in a way that encourages memory retention. Again duh! The real trick is to arrange the negatives in such a way that they become accidentally lost in a sea of text. This can be as simple as putting clearer formatting and bold words in good areas and more unbroken text within areas you want skipped. A simple trick to that is having bracketed abbreviations in areas you want to highlight three letter abbreviations (TLA). See how the inclusion of the acronym draws your eye, as you scan the text and engages your mind to really think and search for the meaning of acronym? Bolding certain words can help too, but is more likely to get you caught. The trick for hiding bad stuff is as I said to ensure it is in a sea of text, use proper but dull language for this part, since people skip long runs of boring text, more often than other areas. Nothing will get past a careful read but most people skip around looking for the important parts, so putting them together can get you a half to a whole page that only glanced at. Again format the lesser subjects well so the reader believes a glance is all they require, don’t make them look for the obvious information. Here is an example scan it.

Education:

Harvard University
Physics and Philosophy (P&P) double major

Advanced class work: Quantum Basket Weaving, Theoretical Particle Philosophy, Pixel Engineering

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Great Outdoors Day School
Finger painting major
More text here

See if you just scanned that you see:

Education:

Harvard University
Physics and Philosophy (P&P) double major

Advanced class work: Quantum Basket Weaving, Theoretical Particle Philosophy, Pixel Engineering

Et harumd und lookum, dereud facilis est er expedit distinct. Blah blah blah next!

Great Outdoors Day School
Finger painting major
More text here

Notice you missed that no degree was mentioned and you missed the part about the sheep, so the reader assumes for you and the bad stuff is covered up.
See how well that works!

The last tip is to write a resume that is generic then really job hunt, look at the desriptions of the jobs you want and remember the words that stand out. Keep a mental track of the keywords and build them in to field specific resume, since the nice folks in HR use machines similar to spam filters to prescreen resumes, your use of keywords saves you. However, since this is common knowledge so applicants use spammer tricks to fool the machine, but a person will trash you in a second if you have lists of keywords. So, do it like it was a MadLib, and use the keywords in a generic story. So instead of “I know JAVA, GUI design, SQL, OO programing, database design, PERL and Cobal”. Write “I implemented a customer interface using a Java driven GUI in a SQL wrapped Object Oriented PERL parser built on a legacy Cobal database.” The machine still sees keywords, the uneducated prescreener in HR also sees the keywords but strung together in an impressive manner, and the actual screener can see what you actually did with that knowledge. To close again I remind you don’t lie, don’t embelish, spin! Spin is an alternative interpreation of a set of facts, it is a lie someone tells themselves.