In my experience the resume has been more of a formality than anything else. I've always been able to get jobs by being referred by a mutual friend/work associate.
That's all very well if you are being headhunted into a company with no formal HR rules. We, for example, are a reasonably cool place to work at but our paymaster is an Equal Opportunities employer. That means we have to be very very strict about the hiring process and even in situations where we know and have solicited an applicant, s/he still has to be graded according to fair and consistent rules like all other applicants.
The original article was correct: an employer typically asks for 6-9 things in a job ad; some will be obvious directly from your resume (eg. "10 years experience in C"); all others should be dealt with in a cover letter. For example if the employer asks for "MacOS X experience" and you haven't got any in your resume, a cover letter that says "while I do not have much direct experience with MacOS X, I have programmed for many years on similar POSIX compliant environments such as FreeBSD and I am confident I would quickly be productive in the MacOS X environment".
