CV is not over-rated. A well written and well formatted CV gives the impression of meticulousness and conscientiousness that all bosses like. Anything that forms the potential employer's first impression of you cannot be over-rated.

The first CVs that I weed out from the pile are the badly formatted ones. If the candidate cannot bother to standardize the font and the format, then it doesn't feel like he takes pride in his work. We all want smart people who also take pride in their work, not just smart people who just do the thinking and leave the rest to others.

Then goes the under-qualified ones. Then those that are badly written: if, given all the time you want, you cannot write proper sentences or convey effectively what you did, then something is wrong.

Finally, if your working experience is less than 10years, i don't see why you need anything more than 1 page of CV. A CV is a succinct summary of the RELEVANT experience you want to tell me when you are applying for my job, it is not meant to be a brain dump of your life story; leave those for your biography's editor when you are 80. A long CV is invariably a brain dump that contains a lot of irrelevant information, and it is a sign of lazyness.

my advice is to maintain a master CV that can be of any page length. when you apply for a job, keep only those experience and education that are relevant to the job to 1 page. 4-page CV is an overkill.

For an example of a good CV format, see the standardized Harvard Business School MBA CV: 1-page; tight; no excessive spacing; relevant