Recruitment guidebooks often give an advice that candidates should make professional, clean and courteous resume both in terms of content and forms.
This advice is totally correct.
However, in certain cases, this rule has become the reason to fail many candidates.
One famous recruitment agency in UK is highly experienced in making up the resume but repeatedly failed when introducing candidates for company y, which recruited for positions relating to online activities.
Studying the differences between resumes that were selected and ones that were failed, it was found out that those failed resumes are "made up" very carefully by the above agency.
All of them were formal documents of 3-4 pages, with a long list of experience.
All the candidates were good and qualified, but in the end, no one got the job.
Meanwhile, resumes of selected candidates were almost sent by email responding to the recruitment ad of the company and were very "different".
Some used colorful background; some were inserted with logos of website and popular brands...
where the candidates had worked for.
Even, some resumes were inserted logo and link of forums where these candidates often visited and posted in which, they stated which forum it was and which role they were.
Some resumes use very simple words used for daily chatting with friends, even with emotion image or phrases inserted in the sentence.
It sounds strange but these "flashy" resumes had won over those "professional" ones (which are much more "qualified" in terms of experience or professional knowledge) in gaining the interview.
The reason to this success is not a matter of good luck or bad luck and not because of the employers themselves.
It's just the matter of their requirements for the job, the creativity, the dynamism, the "informality" and friendliness of the candidates.
In this case, a professional resume is not a successful tool but the appearance, the look of the resume, that's what matters.