You spend hours (maybe days) putting together your resume to distribute to recruiters, companies, and hiring managers alike.  The ugly truth is a decision will be made in about 6 seconds about an initial “fit”: all that time spent making it just perfect, comes down to just 6 seconds.  So how do insure the important information gets seen in that time frame?  A technique knows as “eye tracking” was used to examine just where and what they are looking for. The article, “What Recruiters Look At During the 6 Seconds They Spend On Your Resume,” by Vivian Giang breaks down the study providing heat maps of what is getting looked at and for how long.
The moral of the story is make the important information easy to find and leave out any distracting visuals. Having clear sections and labels without any “fluff” increase the viewers chance of locating the most relevant and important information.
Visit the article to see the heat map of where recruiters were looking and to see the difference formatting can make.