1.
Resume as attachment:
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.
Also, e-mail firewalls may reject the e-mail.
2.
Text format:
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 (rtf).
Once that's done, proofread the document carefully
to be sure that no information was garbled or inadvertently
eliminated in the reformatting process.
3.
Preparing the document:
You'll 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 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.
4.
Format the margin:
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.
5.
Name and date:
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. Your name in the
file name also helps. Resume03.doc is not good as
ETatis03.doc.
