Sending Your Resume via E-mail the Right Way

When submitting your resume to a company for employment consideration, it’s become almost a rule to do so over the Internet. This is the case partially because companies will not consider resumes submitted any other way. 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 believe that adding the resume as an attachment can often take up too much space in an inbox while bringing with it the possibility of security threats like viruses. Also, a company’s security may block the message – or a hiring manager may just not want to take time to open the attachment. 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 could be weird – and worse, the fonts you worked so hard to choose could change. It is for this reason that many pros suggest doing both. This way, you can please those who don’t like looking at attachments, as well as those who can’t stand strange formatting. Another tip many suggest is to send a PDF version because the copy is clean and can’t be tampered with. If You Are Cutting and Pasting … If you’ve decided that you want to 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. As mentioned previously, formatting can cause a lot of problems when copying and pasting into e-mails – especially from word processing programs like Microsoft Word. 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. Since you won’t have bold on your side to set off various sections, you could emphasize sections instead by using a row of equal signs for headings (====Resume====), and capitalizing text within sections. 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.