Your resume is a potentially vast document in which your entire career is chronicled and dissected for the viewing pleasure of the recruiter that you send it to. Except that this is not quite the intent of a resume. While you might have done all kinds of different things over the course of your career, you can not afford to think in terms of just overwhelming the reader with facts, figures and dates, especially since many of these things will not matter in the slightest to the position you are applying for. In order to actually get the interview, you are going to need to harness the important points, and cut away a significant portion of the rest of it. While your resume could read like some kind of self important novel, nobody is really going to take the amount of time necessary to read all of that.
Keep in mind that most recruiters spend, on the average, three or four seconds looking at any given resume which comes across their desk. While this is not quite the “flip book” method that a lot of people fear is going on, it is not quite the level of contemplation that one would hope that their resume draws out of a recruiter. Any sort of ego that you may initially be feeling at the prospect of your own readiness for a particular job can fall by the wayside when your resume gets nothing but entrance to the recycling bin.
The important points of your resume can be broken down in to one simple component- the way that your previous experiences translate into being able to add value to the company you are applying to. If you can explain this simply, explicitly and obviously, you have a reasonably good chance of getting your resume into the “call” pile. Granted, there are no guarantees, but you are certainly going to advantage yourself (and ingratiate yourself to the recruiter) if you make the process of determining your potential worth to their organization as easy as is humanly possible, by relating everything directly to their situation.