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. Many companies won’t look at a resume that’s received through non-electronic means.

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. 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 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 works whether the hiring manager you’re emailing dislikes attachments or prefers them, and it avoids possible issues that your attachment might have like data corruption. 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. Secondly, you should watch your introduction length quite carefully; keep it to 3 lines or less per paragraph and no more than two paragraphs.

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. You can copy and paste from a text-only program like Microsoft’s Notepad (which is included on every Windows computer) if you can’t figure out how to change an email to pure text. You’ll have to offset text with special characters (for instance, ====Introduction====) or use capitals in order to differentiate between sections, since plain text removes formatting like bold or italics.

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. It doesn’t make sense to spend hours and hours on your resume, only to submit it incorrectly via email and ruin your chances of getting a job, so be sure to consider the above tips before clicking that send button.