An Internet-Ready Resume
By Peter Weddle
Weddles.com
You can stop licking those stamps. According to a 2003 survey by Office Team, a California-based staffing firm, almost half of all U.S. employers now prefer to receive applicant resumes via the Internet. That's up from 4% just three years ago. While forcing you to submit your resume a certain way is not the smartest move for employers hoping to attract high caliber employees, the fact is that they’re doing it. So, it’s important that you know how to send a resume online and what you must do to ensure that it arrives with its content intact.
Resumes travel over the Internet as e-mail. They can be included in the body of an e-mail message or attached to it. However, many employers and recruiters do not open e-mail with attachments because computer viruses are also transmitted that way. They quickly hit the Delete button rather than take a chance. Therefore, always send your resume as the text of an e-mail message unless an employer specifically states, on its Web-site or in its job posting, that it will accept resumes sent as attachments.
Unfortunately, however, crafting your resume as an e-mail message is not quite as simple as it sounds. You see, the people who invented e-mail weren’t the same people who invented the word processing systems we use to compose our resumes. Crazy as it sounds, they took different approaches in their designs: the e-mail mavens set the margins on e-mail messages at about 65 characters, while the word processing people set the margins on the documents their systems produce at 115 characters or so. As a result, they created two technologies that are not compatible with each other … unless you make them so.
The first step in embedding your resume in an e-mail message is to eliminate all of the document's formatting. E-mail technology cannot accommodate the centering, paragraphing, bolding and other "eye friendly" features applied to your resume 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. (Simply select either of those options in the drop-down window that appears when you click on the “Save As” button.) Once that's done, proofread the document carefully to be sure that no information was garbled or inadvertently eliminated in the re-formatting process.
You'll then have to make two other changes to prepare your document for its journey in e-mail:
- First, remove any business or higher mathematical symbols from the document. Currently, e-mail technology can interpret and reproduce only the characters that appear on your computer keyboard. Such symbols as the copyright mark and the divided-by sign are unintelligible to e-mail systems.
- Second, change the margins of your resume to 65 characters in width (counting each letter and space) and end each line with a hard carriage break (i.e., by hitting the “Enter” button). Because e-mail messages have narrower margins than word processed documents, it’s important that you protect your document from two potential problems: the e-mail system’s habit of (1) dropping the content of any line that exceeds its margins or, worse, (2) cutting the content off and sticking it somewhere else in your resume. In either case, the result is a document that arrives at the employer’s end as cyberspace junk, rather than the legible record of your employment.
Once you've made those adjustments, your resume is Internet-ready. All you have to do to send it off to an employer is copy it into the body of an e-mail message. This process, which is also known as "cutting and pasting," involves the following five steps:
Step 1: Hold down the left button on your computer’s mouse and highlight your entire resume.Step 2: Hold down the “Ctrl” button on your computer keyboard and simultaneously press the "c" button.Step 3: Open your e-mail program and start a new e-mail message.Step 4: Click your mouse in the body of the message form and then hold down the “Ctrl” button on your keyboard and simultaneously press the "v" button.Step 5: Address your message, identify the position for which you are applying in the “Subject” line or simply enter "The Resume of Jane Doe," and send it off.
One final word of caution. If you decide to send your resume to a recruitment site for inclusion in its resume database (whether it's HotJobs.com, Dice.com or the site maintained by your professional association), always date the document. Resumes in public databases are often copied and re-copied by other sites, so there's no knowing where your resume will end up. Dating the document, however, will avoid any embarrassment later, when your employer finds that old resume out there on the Net.
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Peter Weddle
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Peter Weddle Biography:
Peter Weddle is a recruiter, HR consultant and business CEO turned author and commentator. Described by The Washington Post as "... a man filled with ingenious ideas," he has earned an international reputation, pioneering concepts in Human Resource leadership and employment. He has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The National Business Employment Weekly and CNN.com. Today, he writes two newsletters that are distributed worldwide and oversees WEDDLE's LLC, a print publisher specializing in the field of human resources. WEDDLE's annual Guides and Directory to job boards are recognized for their accuracy and helpfulness, leading the American Staffing Association to call Weddle the “Zagat of the online employment industry.”
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