How To Correctly Send A Resume Through Email
When submitting your resume to a company for employment consideration, it’s become almost a rule to do so over the Internet. Some companies won’t even take a resume that isn’t submitted electronically, as paper resumes interfere with their organization system.
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 gives you extra insurance that your resume will get through, and it ensures that there’s a version of your resume for the email recipient regardless of whether he prefers or dislikes attachments. For the attached resume, consider using the PDF format, because it looks very clean and it can’t be changed by anyone who isn’t authorized.
If You Are Cutting and Pasting …
If you’ve decided that you want 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. Second, make your introduction no more than two paragraphs, each about two to three lines.
Third, use text for the e-mail instead of HTML. Copying and pasting text can remove or ruin formatting, as poitned out earlier, and these problems are especially common when your resume was created with Microsoft Word or other word processors. If you can’t figure out how to change the e-mail to text, you could also copy your resume into a text-only program like Notepad first then paste it into the e-mail. 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. So before you submit your masterpiece, consider these tips for sending your resume via e-mail the right way.
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