1. Place your strongest material in the two-inch visual space that begins about 2 5/8 inches from the top of your résumé. Make sure you include your most impressive, impactful achievements and qualifications in this "primetime" space. It’s where the reader’s eyes will focus first.

2. Use a professional profile or qualifications section in your résumé’s primetime space to give the employer a quick but concrete capsule of your achievements and skills. Write it when the rest of your résumé is complete and you’ve already decided what your strongest qualifications are.

3. Give the most weight to your most recent (past ten to fifteen years) professional position. The section of the résumé for your most recent position should contain more bulleted accomplishments than your previous positions. For each position, rank the accomplishments in order of decreasing relevance to the employer you are targeting.

4. Quantify your impact on the organizations you have worked for. If you reduced expenses, say by how much or by what percentage. If you supervised a project, say how many were on your team. Always ask yourself how you helped the organization, and insert the numbers that demonstrate that impact.

5. Pay as much attention to your résumé’s design as you do to its content. Use bullets or other appropriate symbols, insert rules (horizontal lines) to separate major sections, and use a 10-to-12-point conservative typeface for the body text of the résumé. Aim for 1-inch side margins and slightly smaller top and bottom margins.

6. Include publications, patents, presentations, honors, relevant volunteer experiences, and professional licenses or certifications in your résumé, particularly if they are relevant to the position you seek. These "extras" can sometimes be the factor that wins you the interview.

7. Edit and proofread mercilessly. Edit your résumé to reduce fluff and make every word count. Set your résumé aside for a few days and then come back to it again with "fresh eyes." Misspelled words and grammatical mistakes are the proverbial kiss of death in a résumé. Eliminate them.

8. Place your education after your experience if you’ve been in the workforce for more than five years. If the degree you earned is the most relevant or impressive detail of your education section, highlight it. If the school you attended is the selling point, emphasize it.

9. Use a one-page résumé if appropriate. One-page résumés are fine (and in some cases, preferable) except that you’ve been in the workforce for about ten years or more or have particularly impressive work experience.

10. Don’t use pronouns ("I") or articles ("a," "the"). They detract from the force of your accomplishments, slow down the reader, and take up precious space.

11. Don’t provide personal data. Marital status, date of birth, height/weight, and similar non-work-related information can be used to illegally discriminate against applicants, and they rarely add anything of value to your qualifications.

12. Don’t repeat the same action words throughout the résumé. Instead of using the verb developed or led over and over, pull out your thesaurus and mix in terms like accelerated, delivered, directed, established, initiated, or reengineered.