This is me talking from the hiring side, but anyway... what immediately landed this guy an invitation for an interview were his claims, in no particular order:
that his IQ is 160, as measured by an internet quiz,
that he regularly comes to new workplace and explains to the boss how he's been doing stuff wrong and how to improve them,
that he always takes the lead role in new work teams and leads them to successes beyond the most optimistic projections,
that he often feels like he's working with mentally inferior people who struggle to keep up with his advanced ideas...
I may have been mean, but I suggested we invite the guy just to see if he was serious. He never responded to the invitation, so I live my life with this unsatiated curiosity and every now and then think about how he might have changed the world if he had joined our team.
On a more serious note (even though the above is 100% true), right now I'm in the process of looking for another job. My CV is just a plain boring table with invisible borders and short description of stuff. I got an invitation for some tests two weeks ago and just today got a call to come in for another round. I don't think the format of CV matters much if you are applying for work at a relatively small company where HR can reasonably read all the applications and only matter when the company is quite large. That being said, on my previous job, in the hiring round I was in they accepted 12 individuals, and I know for a fact that they had more than 1000 applicants and somehow my boring CV still got the HR's attention.
