When submitting your resume to a company for employment consideration, it’s become almost a rule to do so over the Internet. Many companies won t look at a resume that s received through non electronic means.
So now that you know that you will very likely continue to be required to submit your resume online, it’s a good idea to learn how to do so the right way. Here are a few tips to consider:
Attachments
There is a little bit of a debate going on about whether you should add the resume as an attachment when submitting it or placing it in the body of the e mail. Some say that attachments aren t a good idea, as they take up space in the employer s inbox and may possibly contain viruses. It s also worthwhile to consider that a company s email security might block the message, or the hiring manager might avoid the message altogether if he doesn t want to take the time to open it.
On the other hand, depending on what e mail program you’re using (and the employer is using) cutting and pasting your resume into the body of an email could look ill formatted. Spacing and fonts can change, leaving you with a completely different document than what you d worked hard to lay out. It is for this reason that many pros suggest doing both. This works whether the hiring manager you re emailing dislikes attachments or prefers them, and it avoids possible issues that your attachment might have like data corruption. Another good idea is to use a PDF format when sending the resume, as it always looks clear and clean and it doesn t allow anyone to change your resume (other than you).
If You Are Cutting and Pasting …
If you’ve decided that you want to go ahead and paste your resume into the body of an e mail, it’s good to consider a few rules of cutting and pasting. First, remember to add a brief introduction of yourself, something that would do the job of a cover letter. You should also limit your introduction to two paragraphs or less, and limit each paragraph to two or three sentences.
Third, use text for the e mail instead of HTML. Word processing programs can wreak havoc with the layout of your resume text when you use copy and paste, as pointed out earlier. If you don t know how to change an email to plain text in your email client, an easy alternative is to use a text only program (Notepad is free and comes pre installed on Windows), then copying and pasting your resume into email. Unfortunately, you won t have the ability to use bold or italics in your resume with plain text, so you ll have to use a bit of creativity to set different sections apart from one another try using special characters around words, or using your capitalization ( RESUME INTRODUCTION , etc).
Avoiding Spam Folders
As mentioned previously, your resume can sometimes get lost in a company’s security efforts. So to help you avoid spam folders and other issues, you could consider keeping punctuation (especially exclamation marks) out of the subject line and avoiding any other words that might be misinterpreted as something inappropriate by spam folders.
The last thing that you want is to create the perfect resume only to not have it reach its destination appropriately. If you ve spent a lot of time on your resume, it s certainly worth spending a little more to ensure that you re submitting it correctly via email.
Author Resource:
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