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Resume Tips: Emailing Your Resume
As you take the time to prepare a resume to
aid in your job search, you will need to consider the possibilities and
restrictions that will be placed on you whenever you need to email a resume to a
prospective employer. Many different businesses will prefer to cut back on their
use of paper and want to see an understanding of electronic modes of communication
with any potential employees. This means that you will need to email your resume to
them. What many people do not realize, however, is that there are technical
specifications, which need to be adapted when you build a resume for
emailing.
What Happens When You Email a Resume?
Most people will use a word processor, when they write their
resume, which is probably the smartest approach that they could take. When you use
a word processor, you will be able to format the resume to highlight certain
features, which can make you stand out as an applicant. This should result in a
great looking document that will make a great representation of
yourself.
Sending this same document in an email however, gets a bit
tricky. If you copy and paste the text from your word processor document, the same
formatting, which makes you stand out through the processor will quickly undermine
your attempts to impress in an email document. All of the formatting will turn into
coding, which clutters your resume and can even turn it unreadable. With one look
at a resume like this, employers will discard you immediately because your resume
is not only unreadable, but you have betrayed the fact that you are not prepared to
work with computers long term.
What Should You Do To Keep It Looking
Impressive?
It is still important to create your resume with the formatting
in place. This will show up when you print out copies of your resume or you send
the resume itself as an attachment. In addition to this however, you will need to
create a text-only version of your resume, which you can easily incorporate into an
email document.
• Do a Basic Clean-up: Some basic cleanup
may be needed after this transformation. Pasting your resume into a Notepad file
will remove all formatting. Bullet points will need to be changed into a dash; line
spacing may need to be adjusted. Symbols in your resume may need to be removed if
they cannot transfer properly. With this basic cleanup, you should be able to turn
your resume into a good looking summary of yourself and your work experience, even
if it does not feature the special formatting which made you stand out
originally.
• Check it Out: Before you send this off to
employers though, you will need to test it out. Different email programs may read
text differently and you will want to make sure that your resume is readable
through different filters. Send a copy to yourself and enlist the help of friends,
who have email accounts on different servers. If everything checks out okay, you
should be ready to send the resume out to employers.
You may still want to send the original resume as an email
attachment. Another option is to create a PDF version of your resume and attach it
to your email. This will allow the employers to look at the resume as it was
originally intended to be seen and this version could be printed out if desired.
This can add to your impression and could help you get closer to scoring the
job!
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