Editor's note: In this feature, CareerJournal.com presents before and after resumes of actual job hunters. The name of the candidate, his prior employers and contact information have been changed.

Carl's consulting job on a government-related project with an electronics company was winding down. The consultant was looking for new projects, preferably closer to his home in Atlanta.

His homemade document had served him well during the first 18 years of his career as he changed jobs within a large engineering-construction company. But after four years as an independent consultant, simple updates were no longer sufficient. After two months of job hunting, his out-of-date resume wasn't yielding results.

"When I left to go out on my own, that's when the resume got much more important," Carl says. For the first time in nearly two decades, he was searching for work.

Carl recalled liking a friend's resume and asked who had helped with it. His friend referred him to Arnold Boldt, managing partner of Arnold-Smith Associates in Rochester, N.Y., whom he hired.

The situation: Carl had made a successful transition from long-time company employee to independent project-management consultant. But after working for four years on projects in upstate New York and the Midwest, he wanted to zero in on projects in the Southeast.

Mr. Boldt read through Carl's resume and cover letter, then set them aside and called to talk. "I've found over the years that having a conversation with my clients and letting them tell me in their own words what they do and what they feel their accomplishments are is helpful," says Mr. Boldt, who charges between $275 and $325 for his services.

In addition to a new resume, Mr. Boldt provided Carl with a cover letter that bullet-pointed his most important projects and results.

The challenge: The engineering consultant had deep experience managing government-contract projects, some top secret and requiring government clearance. But his three-page resume was so jam-packed with his long and varied job descriptions that it was hard to sort out his key accomplishments at a glance. Plus, the text-rich format made a reader work hard to absorb it all.

The first order of business was sharpening the content. "It was easy to get bogged down in some of the details without really understanding what he had achieved," Mr. Boldt says.

In addition, Mr. Boldt says, he aimed to make it visually appealing. "The old resume was a little bit text heavy," he says. "Ultimately, a human being is going to look at it, and their first impression is going to have a lot to do with how much time they spend reading it and whether it is sorted into a pile for further consideration."

The fix: Carl's new resume has a more detailed summary at the top of the first page, which starts with his continued career goal in project management/project controls. Below that, it lists the project areas he has worked in. Carl's strongest characteristics are italicized, and his specific skills are highlighted in bullet points.

"Keep the resume front-end loaded with a summary with bullet points," Mr. Boldt says. "The top half of the first page should have enough information for someone scanning a stack of resumes to pick this one out from the others."

In the professional experience section of the resume, Carl's key accomplishments in each job are italicized, so that they stand out.

Professionals sometimes have difficulty explaining their accomplishments. To help clients think in terms of success stories, Mr. Boldt tells them to use an easy-to-remember acronym: "CARS," which stands for:

• Challenge
• Action
• Results
• Success

He asks: What was the problem you faced, what steps did you take and what were the results? "You want to show success in measurable results," Mr. Boldt says.

For visual appeal, a "headline" announces Carl's job goal at the top of the page. Under it, industries are listed in subheads. Additionally, the text-heavy job descriptions were traded for bullet points that succinctly summarize his abilities.

The result: Mr. Boldt ran Carl's job criteria -- for industry, geography and salary level -- through a database of employers and recruiters to find a list of matches. Carl's resume and cover letter were emailed to the resulting list, and he got three calls the first day. "Within the next three days, I got 10 more," he says. He had five phone interviews, but his break came when he ran into a colleague at an airport, who referred him for a consulting project assignment in Atlanta, where he wanted to be. He got the job.

Two years later, Carl is still based in Atlanta but his work on government-defense contracts takes him to California. His income has tripled, and he credits his redesigned resume with helping him win his contracts as an independent consultant. "Other than updating the resume myself, I haven't changed the format at all," Carl says