Tips for
your E-Mail Resume:always send your resume as text of an e-mail message. |
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Scannable Resume:
Always send your resume as the text of an e-mail message unless an employer specifically states on its website or in its job postings that it will accept resumes sent as attachments. Reason? The threat of computer viruses sent as attachments.
E-mail technology cannot accommodate the centering, paragraphing, bolding and other "eye friendly" features installed in the document by your word processing system. You can easily remove them, however, by using the "Save As..." function on your computer and creating a second version of your resume in ASCII text or Rich Text Format. Once that's done, proofread the document carefully to be sure that no information was garbled or inadvertently eliminated in the re-formatting process.
Then, you'll have to make two other changes to prepare your document for its journey in e-mail:
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First, remove any business or higher mathematical symbols from the document. Currently, e-mail technology can interpret and understand only the characters that appear on your computer keyboard. Such symbols as "©", the copyright sign, and "÷", the division sign, are unintelligible to e-mail systems. |
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Second, change the margins of your resume to 65 characters in width and end each line with a hard carriage break (i.e., by hitting the Enter button). Unfortunately, e-mail systems have margins that are much narrower than those of word processing systems and cannot "line wrap" or continue sentences onto another line when they exceed the margins. Therefore, slimming down your resume is the only way to ensure that nothing gets dropped into the cyber waste bin when the document arrives at its destination.
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If you send your resume to a recruitment site for inclusion in its resume database (monster.com, flipdog.com, hotjobs.com or the site maintained by your professional association), always DATE the document. Resumes in public databases are often copied and recopied by other sites so there's no knowing where your resume may end up. Dating the document, however, will avoid any embarrassment later when your employer finds that old document out there on the net.
Reprinted in part from Peter Weddle's article, Tips for your E-Mail Resume. For more information, visit www.weddles.com |
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