I gotta question for you, as a watcher of and player in our industry (this "thing of ours" <grin>). Is your company heavily into certifications for IT folk? Are certs very important to your company, or just a nice thing to have?
Certs do fluff up a resume nicely. But that said... not very many of my department have certs other then my network engineer. He has a CCIE, but just written, not practical (pretty common, that, the practical test is a real bugger).
I think only one of the group, a new hire, has an MCSE.
If you twisted my arm I'd say that certs don't really matter to me. There are too many people with boot-camp certs that really don't mean much (called "paper MCSE's").
Experience and (drum roll) *writing skills* are the things that make resumes float to the top in my group.
But all that said, you have to make a resume get pulled from the stack for an interview, and certs might just be the thing that does it, all else being equal.