When I was in recruitment we used to see some very original attempts by people to get their cv's to stand out. Times have changed and a lot of cvs are now machine scanned for key words and phrases, and sorted accordingly.
I don't know whether these ideas are good or bad these days, but we used to get cvs on coloured paper, or landscape format, or in unusual typefaces. One pretentious clown had his delivered by DHL, not because there was any urgency but just to act Mr. Big. We also used to get hand written ones, sometimes in beautiful Italic script, and if the handwriting was attractive and clear that was looked on favourably, but I suspect that now you would be labelled a Luddite or dinosaur for doing this.
Freemail domains such as Hotmail and Yahoo are a bit of a no-no with most recruiters, but for some reason Gmail seems respectable. There is a freemail (mail.com I think) provider which provides free addresses with a huge range of domain names but tends to be used by scammers. GMX is free and seems like a good one as a lot of people don't know it's free. Silly addresses are obviously a no-no. A friend of mine wondered why his applications for a proper job from '
[email protected]' were ignored.
Not sure about photos, in some countries it is illegal to put a photo, which is probably a bit daft. I think the same applies to date of birth/age unless it is strictly relevant to the job.
The biggest cause for rejection/ignoring is slopy speling and grammer and the old hackneyed
phrases.