Last year, I was lucky enough to work with an excellent career coach, who had some very interesting views on how CV's should be formatted. The reasoning behind it all was very simple, and having been on the receiving end of a pile of CV's to process myself on more than one occasion, it rang very true.
There are only really ever two people that will read a CV - the hiring manager (or a delegated subordinate) and someone from HR. The hiring manager/subordinate will not be in a good mood as they have had to take time out of their schedule to process the CVs. The HR person is almost certainly not an expert in the role concerned, so will most likely struggle to know if someone is suitable. Both want easy lives, but the way most of us format our CVs, we make life difficult for them.
We tend to bury away key information across the CV, usually somewhere in the Career History section (which is rarely on the front page), and so they have to play detective to figure out if we are suitable for the role and worth interviewing.
Instead, we need to make it really easy for these people. The first of our (maximum) two pages should be focussed specifically on what they have asked for in the job specification. We should start by writing a good introductory paragraph describing ourselves and why we are right for that specific role. We could even go as far as to make it very obvious that we have tailored the CV by saying something like, "I would very much like to work for Acme Ltd. as I have a great passion for the products you make". This should alert the person reading the CV that we are someone who is prepared to put the effort in and not just send in a generic CV.
The rest of the first page should be five or six key points, under the heading of Key Skills, that explain how we have experience of all (or most of) the things they have listed on the job description. These should describe both what we did, and how it benefitted the company we worked for. By the end of the first page, it should be patently obvious to the hiring manager that we are worthy of interviewing, and they haven't had to break into a sweat to figure it out. Conversely, if we can’t do this, it probably means that we aren’t right for the job, so give up now. Sending in a generic CV to a job we are not suited for is just a pain of those having to sift through them.
The second page of our CV should contain our career history, but again keep it relevant to the job description. With only two pages, space is at a premium too, so we have to keep it focussed. By this stage, they just want to know a bit more about whom we have worked for and what we did for them. Similarly, the Education and Qualifications section should be similarly honed to the job at hand. Finally, round off the second page with a short paragraph on our interests and hobbies, more to reassure them that we are human.