E-mailing Your Resume

If your potential employers says "E-mail me your resume," you need to know how to launch your document into cyberspace so that it gets to the manager in good shape. Here are a few rules for e-mailing your resume:

First off, paste your resume and cover letter into the body of one e-mail message -- don't attach them as a file. It's possible that the employer won't have the same computer program you have and he wouldn't able to open your resume if it's sent as an attached file.

Before dropping your resume into an e-mail format, adjust it in the following ways:

• Substitute bold, italics, and large fonts with all caps to highlight special words.
• Instead of using bullet points, use dashes or insert extra line spacing to break the text into bite size pieces.
• Be sure to use quotation marks that are straight (called stupid quotes), not the curly ones (smart quotes).
• Keep everything flush left -- no tabs, columns or indents.
• To avoid unwanted line wraps, don't exceed 72 characters (and spaces) per line -- 60 characters would be safest. Use forced return at the end of each line.
• Your resume and cover letter together should not be more than three pages long.

Before sending your documents to the employer, test e-mail a copy to yourself to be sure it transmits the way you want it to. Then send it to the friend who uses a different Internet provider than the one you use. If it passes these two tests, you're ready to e-mail it to the employer.

©1998 Susan Ireland · Author of books: The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Resume, The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Cover Letter, and the CD-ROM: Resumes That Work · Owner of Susan Ireland's Resume Service (Writing, Critiques, and Workshops), serving national and San Francisco area clients. Information: (510) 558-0632 · Appointments (510) 524-5238 Used with permission.